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https://firstround.com/review/How-Etsy-Grew-their-Number-of-Female-Engineers-by-500-in-One-Year/

At First Round Capital, we spend a lot of time and resources supporting our technical leadership from across our 170+ companies.

We're uniquely focused on connecting these technologists with each other and knowledge to help them make better decisions and build stronger engineering organizations. One example of this is our Annual CTO Summit — a private all-day experience for our engineering leadership — where they join us in San Francisco for an intensive day of learning.

Historically, we've kept all of this content locked away and only accessible to our companies — mainly to create a sense of community. Now, we've started to believe this knowledge should be shared with the world in an attempt to help others get better. So over the coming months, we're going to begin to share a handful of these talks right here on the Review. So without further delay, here's our very first CTO Summit talk from Kellan Elliott-McCrea, CTO at Etsy.

Elliott-McCrea, a former architect at Flickr and co-author of the OAuth spec, is now the CTO at Etsy, the world's most vibrant handmade marketplace. During his tenure, he’s played a critical role in the company’s restructuring of its engineering organization. Now Etsy hires for diversity, particularly gender diversity. After witnessing firsthand how challenging it can be to attract women engineers, Elliott-McCrea shares lessons in building a process and culture to attract female engineers.

Etsy’s decision to pursue women engineers is indicative of a broader sea change: Making diversity a core value. But even after a number of concerted efforts to bring more female talent onboard, the company achieved almost no progress. In fact, in one year they actually saw a 35% decline in gender diversity even when it was a priority.

Before we dive into how to recruit more female engineers at your own company, it’s important to understand why Etsy made hiring women a priority (and why it’s important for your organization, too).

Etsy & Diversity Go Hand-in-Hand

Eighty percent of Etsy’s customers are women. And while it’d be outlandish to suggest that hiring female engineers somehow makes them chromosomally connected to the product, there are definitely some shared experiences.

Etsy also had a substantial “boys versus girls” dynamic, where engineers (mostly male) sat on one side and the women on the other. It was a broken system that required changes on both sides of the house.

Why Your Company Should Make Hiring Women a Priority, Too

Even science recognizes that diversity is important. Research from both the Kellogg and Sloan Schools suggest that cognitively diverse teams perform better on hard problems.

Beyond that, though, hiring for diversity will set up better recruiting opportunities. Consider Harvard’s graduating computer science class: 41% of the students are women, and an inability to hire talented females will start to significantly impact your ability to recruit altogether.

As you try to bring on women engineers, be aware of some key realities:

• Simply saying that you value diversity internally isn’t enough — there’s just no reason for an outside observer to believe you if they come and see a scarcity of women in the organization.
• Women tend to be conservative about switching jobs, especially if they’ve had a negative experience in the past with an employer. You need to demonstrate why your company is a great place to work, and a great place in particular for a woman to work.
• Lowering standards is counter-productive — the idea that “it’s hard to hire women engineers therefore we won’t hold them to such a high standard” is noxious. It reinforces the impression that women aren’t good at engineering, which is obviously a downward spiral.
• Most technical interviews suck — fundamentally interviewers ask the question, “Quick, prove to me how smart you are!” “Smart” is not optional. “Quick” and “prove to me” are very rarely actually part of the job and you’re interviewing for the wrong thing, which generally sets up women for failure in the process.

How Etsy Was Able to Make it Happen: A Hacker School Hybrid

Mark Hedlund, Etsy’s VP of Engineering, launched "Etsy Hacker Grants" to provide need-based scholarships to talented women engineers enrolling in Hacker School (a three-month hands-on course designed to teach people how to become better engineers). A number of studies, like one from CMU, have shown that people perform better in math and science if 50% of the participants are women, so gender distribution was a key metric in future Hacker School classes.

Etsy ran this program in the Summer and Fall of 2012 and watched the number of applications skyrocket each time. And in the summer of 2012, women ended up making up over half of the Hacker School class! For Etsy, the process was objectively worth the investment. If you figure that there’s normally a $20,000 placement fee, Etsy was able to hire eight candidates. You do the math.

At the time of the talk, Etsy had 20 women on its 110-person engineering team, which is a roughly 18% increase from the previous year. It’s not quite hockey stick growth, but it’s a huge step forward.

A New Hiring Standard

Etsy attributes quite a bit of its success to its grants, which felt like a real invitation: It was a sign that Etsy was taking the project seriously, and hustling to get the message out there.

The process also had one major implication on Etsy’s hiring standards: It didn’t lower them, but definitely changed them. The experiment proved that it’s almost impossible to hire senior women engineers to join the organization, so Etsy is hiring junior engineers, instead. A lot of times, these people might not have enough hands-on experience, and Etsy might be inclined to pass on hiring these engineers. But by putting them through Hacker School and effectively getting to know them, they’re not as risky.

Design parameters for a successful solution:

• Be serious, but inviting: The standards were high, you had to work to get in, but people were made to feel welcome.
• Look for balance: gender-balance, skill-balance, a wide range of skills and a wide range of team sizes.
• Optimize for building together: “Let’s build things together” rather than “Let me prove to you how smart I am.”
• Optimize for data gathering: Gather a ton of data to make it easier to evaluate things.
• Normalize within your organization: The data helped normalize the experiment within the organization.
• Conduct your experiment publicly: Create your own accountability by being vocal about what you're doing.

One More Pro Tip

Etsy’s seen the most success when there’s either zero or two women engineers on a team. If there’s only one, she’s a woman engineer as opposed to just an engineer.

Etsy is busy working on it's next project focused on getting more women into engineering leadership roles. Stay tuned for details.

We're currently getting ready for demo day at YC, which means quite a lot of pitch practice. Here are the main points of feedback we tend to give to teams. This advice works for almost any kind of presentation you might give.

Speaking

• Speak slowly and enunciate
• Be excited. Your pitch should not sound memorized. Intonation, cadence, and projecting help a lot
• Be specific and concise
• Look at the audience. You don't have to make eye contact with individuals, just with areas of the crowd. People in those areas will think you've made eye contact with them
• Don't use generic phrases as transitions ("so...")
• Actually explain what you do, and do it quickly
• If you make a large transition, be very clear about it and explain why
• Don't be "cute" with your points, be declarative
• If you make a joke, telegraph it. If you're not sure the joke will land, cut it
• Don't hide the big good things because you are modest, highlight them specifically early on
• Use natural language and simple sentences, i.e. no sentences with three verbs
• Don't use words you wouldn't use in normal conversation
• If an example is a real person, make it clear that you're talking about a real person, not a user model

Charts/metrics

• Charts should be easy to understand - make one point with any graphic or chart. Don't make people read charts - they'll stop listening to you.
• If you put up a graph that confuses people, they will feel stupid and stop listening
• Line graphs are better than bar graphs when showing growth
• Label your axes and use real numbers - even if they are small. The shape of the graph matters, not the absolute numbers
• Explain anomalies
• If you should be generating revenue and then show a different metric, investors will be suspicious
• TAM should be bottom up, not top down

Slides

• Titles should describe the slide
• Slides should be reentrant - each should make sense and make your case individually
• Remember that minds wander, and people check phones. When they look up, they should immediately be able to pick up the thread
• Don't use pretty, but thin, fonts. This isn't a time for subtlety, make sure your slides are legible from far away
• Coolness and legibility are not orthogonal, they're diametrically opposed[1]
• Screenshot slides are typically bad

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[1] This feels like something PG might have said directly, but I can't honestly remember.

Want to follow all of these networks and people on Twitter? I made a Twitter list to make it easier.

• Angel networks
• Angels and early-stage investors

• Online resources

• Joshua Henderson’s Ultimate Guide for Finding Women Investors (gives great resources for searching for female investors)

• Melissa Pierce’s list of 105 female venture capitalists and angels (for those seeking later stage investors)

Outline

Click on any section to jump to the relevant portion of the piece!

• Pre-Meeting Prep

• Board Meeting Agenda (more details at the link!)

• Board Business (5 minutes)

• CEO Update (10 minutes)
• Org Chart (5 minutes)
• Financials and Key Metrics (20 minutes)
• Functional Updates Across Marketing, Product, Engineering etc. (20 - 30 minutes)
• Focus Areas (10 minutes)
• Discussion (50- 60 minutes)
• Executive Session (20- 30 minutes)

Outline

Click on any section to jump to the relevant portion of the piece!

• The Problems With Goals
• The Benefits of Habits
• Why a Systematic Approach Works

Outline

Click on any section to jump to the relevant portion of the piece!

• 8 Steps!

Outline

• Board Deck Templates

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nudUpI1ZDQ_3sqP4t_tm8H1hOn7LPoRb/view?usp=sharing

Download the report from here →

Watch the replay here →

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Chief of Staff roles take many forms, as do career paths after operating in the role. If you're considering applying for a CoS role or are currently a CoS, join us for a conversation with three former Chiefs. You'll hear about how each individual leveraged their experience to land leadership positions at some of the most successful tech companies. We'll collect your questions prior to the panel and live during the event. See below for more information on our great panelists!

Rachel Lau oversees Go-to-Market Treasury Strategy and Operations for PayPal and its subsidiaries from the New York office. Prior to PayPal, Rachel worked at Via Transportation as Chief of Staff to the CEO and as an Expansion Manager, overseeing the launch of Via's shared-ride technology in new markets. She has also worked at J.P. Morgan in its New York and Hong Kong offices. Rachel completed her BSBA in Finance and International Business with a minor in Psychology at Georgetown University.

Dev Sethi is the Head of Sports at Instagram. He oversees strategic partnerships across the sports ecosystem, including athletes, leagues, teams, and media organizations. Before joining Instagram in fall 2018, Dev was Complex Networks' first Chief of Staff reporting to CEO Rich Antoniello. Hired after Complex was acquired by Verizon and Hearst in a joint venture, he was responsible for creating strategic external partnerships as well as optimizing internal operations across content and business functions spanning Complex Networks’ portfolio of millennial-focused brands. Prior to Complex, Dev led Partnerships & Operations at media startup Whistle Sports, an emerging sports media brand, data/analytics consultancy, and content network. Dev spent the first 6 years of his career at Google, the first 4 working in its sales practice before transitioning to YouTube to manage new partnerships focused on the sports vertical.

Maggie Hsu is the Global Business Development Lead for Amazon Managed Blockchain. Previously, she led business development for Fluidity, a technology provider for tokenizing and trading securities on Ethereum. Prior to that, Maggie was Chief of Staff for Tony Hsieh of Zappos.com, as well as a consultant at McKinsey. She holds undergraduate and MBA degrees from Harvard University.

https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/leadership-self-assessment

Knowing yourself is critical to being an effective leader. Building self-awareness and understanding your tendencies and motivational drivers can enable you to unlock potential in yourself and your team.

“Self-awareness is about developing your capacity to sense how you’re coming across, to have undistorted visibility into your own strengths and weaknesses, and to be able to gauge the emotions you’re personally experiencing,” says Harvard Business School Professor Joshua Margolis in the online course Leadership Principles. “If you’re going to mobilize others to get things done, you can’t let your own emotions get in the way.”

According to an analysis by Korn/Ferry International, companies with higher rates of financial return tend to employ professionals with high degrees of self-awareness. Research also shows that self-aware leaders report having:

• Greater effectiveness in the workplace
• Better relationships with colleagues
• An improved ability to identify and manage their emotions
• Reduced stress

Reaping these rewards can be achieved through honest self-assessment. By examining the patterns that emerge in how you view yourself, and how others experience you, you can identify ways to learn and develop as a leader.

If you want to maximize your career trajectory and improve how you guide and manage teams, here are four ways you can assess your leadership effectiveness.

How to Assess Your Leadership Effectiveness

1. Complete a Self-Assessment

Questionnaires can be useful for identifying your motivations and strengths. In the online course Leadership Principles, participants complete two self-assessments: The Emotional and Social Competency Inventory (ESCI) and the Personal Values Questionnaire (PVQ).

By taking these assessments, learners can recognize behavioral patterns and gain insight into how they manage themselves and their colleagues.

This self-awareness is critical to effective leadership because it develops emotional intelligence—an ability that’s possessed by 90 percent of top performers in the workplace. Through looking inward and answering questions with honesty and candor, you learn how to better command your emotions, as well as others’, and build a foundation for your leadership approach.

2. Observe Yourself

In addition to self-assessments, observing a video recording of yourself can be a valuable way to learn more about your leadership tendencies. Taking part in this kind of exercise can enable you to gauge how you present yourself and exhibit attributes of different leadership styles, such as authenticity, humility, and faith.

Engaging in critical self-observation can also help you overcome the vulnerability that comes with putting yourself in front of others as a leader, providing you with the confidence needed to inspire and influence your team.

3. Ask for Feedback

Beyond self-reflection, turn to those you interact and collaborate with for feedback on your effectiveness. Unlike management, leadership is less about administering and organizing, and more about aligning and empowering employees to pursue organizational goals.

By turning to your colleagues for thoughts on how they experience your leadership style, you can identify discrepancies in how you perceive yourself and chart a plan for improvement.

Soliciting and heeding feedback also helps develop clear lines of communication with your team, which is essential for building trust and driving performance (pdf).

For Juliana Casale, a marketing professional who took the online course Leadership Principles, completing self-assessments and receiving peer feedback led to a greater sense of awareness in her role and improved communication with her team.

“I'm now more mindful of how my colleagues are experiencing me, and less averse to having difficult conversations,” Casale says.

4. Build and Maintain a Robust Network

Leadership is a skill that must be honed over time. As you progress throughout your career, it’s vital to cultivate a robust network you can rely on for coaching, support, and guidance.

“Your internal and external networks are important leadership assets,” says HBS Professor Anthony Mayo in the online course Leadership Principles. “They're how you gain access to resources like information, know-how, and funding that are crucial in enabling you to help those you’re leading. Networks also foster your learning by connecting you to people in organizations with different skills, perspectives, and contexts than your own.”

Through networking, you can build a powerful resource that exposes you to new opportunities and drives your personal growth and success.

Unleashing Your Leadership Potential

You can be an effective leader at any stage of your career. Whether you’re a mid-level manager or new to the workforce, honing your leadership skills can pay dividends for your professional development.

By building self-awareness, soliciting feedback, and networking, you can gain a better understanding of your personal leadership style and unleash the potential in yourself and others.

Do you want to enhance your leadership skills? Download our free leadership e-book and explore our online course Leadership Principles to discover how you can become a more effective leader and unleash the potential in yourself and others.

Matt Gavin is a member of the marketing team at Harvard Business School Online. Prior to returning to his home state of Massachusetts and joining HBS Online, he lived in North Carolina, where he held roles in content writing and social media. He has a background in video production, and previously worked on several documentary films for Boston’s PBS station, WGBH. In his spare time, he enjoys running, cycling, exploring New England, and spending time with his family.

Most developmental psychologists agree that what differentiates leaders is not so much their philosophy of leadership, their personality, or their style of management. Rather, it’s their internal “action logic”—how they interpret their surroundings and react when their power or safety is challenged. Relatively few leaders, however, try to understand their own action logic, and fewer still have explored the possibility of changing it.

They should, because we’ve found that leaders who do undertake a voyage of personal understanding and development can transform not only their own capabilities but also those of their companies. In our close collaboration with psychologist Susanne Cook-Greuter—and our 25 years of extensive survey-based consulting at companies such as Deutsche Bank, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Hewlett-Packard, NSA, Trillium Asset Management, Aviva, and Volvo—we’ve worked with thousands of executives as they’ve tried to develop their leadership skills. The good news is that leaders who make an effort to understand their own action logic can improve their ability to lead. But to do that, it’s important first to understand what kind of leader you already are.

The Seven Action Logics

Our research is based on a sentence-completion survey tool called the Leadership Development Profile. Using this tool, participants are asked to complete 36 sentences that begin with phrases such as “A good leader…,” to which responses vary widely:

“…cracks the whip.”

“…realizes that it’s important to achieve good performance from subordinates.”

“…juggles competing forces and takes responsibility for her decisions.”

By asking participants to complete sentences of this type, it’s possible for highly trained evaluators to paint a picture of how participants interpret their own actions and the world around them; these “pictures” show which one of seven developmental action logics—Opportunist, Diplomat, Expert, Achiever, Individualist, Strategist, or Alchemist—currently functions as a leader’s dominant way of thinking. Leaders can move through these categories as their abilities grow, so taking the Leadership Development Profile again several years later can reveal whether a leader’s action logic has evolved.

Over the past 25 years, we and other researchers have administered the sentence-completion survey to thousands of managers and professionals, most between the ages of 25 and 55, at hundreds of American and European companies (as well as nonprofits and governmental agencies) in diverse industries. What we found is that the levels of corporate and individual performance vary according to action logic. Notably, we found that the three types of leaders associated with below-average corporate performance (Opportunists, Diplomats, and Experts) accounted for 55% of our sample. They were significantly less effective at implementing organizational strategies than the 30% of the sample who measured as Achievers. Moreover, only the final 15% of managers in the sample (Individualists, Strategists, and Alchemists) showed the consistent capacity to innovate and to successfully transform their organizations.

Different leaders exhibit different kinds of action logic—ways in which they interpret their surroundings and react when their power or safety is challenged. In our research of thousands of leaders, we observed seven types of action logics. The least effective for organizational leadership are the Opportunist and Diplomat; the most effective, the Strategist and Alchemist. Knowing your own action logic can be the first step toward developing a more effective leadership style. If you recognize yourself as an Individualist, for example, you can work, through both formal and informal measures, to develop the strengths and characteristics of a Strategist.

Read more

To understand how leaders fall into such distinct categories and corporate performance, let’s look in more detail at each leadership style in turn, starting with the least productive (and least complex).

The Opportunist

Our most comforting finding was that only 5% of the leaders in our sample were characterized by mistrust, egocentrism, and manipulativeness. We call these leaders Opportunists, a title that reflects their tendency to focus on personal wins and see the world and other people as opportunities to be exploited. Their approach to the outside world is largely determined by their perception of control—in other words, how they will react to an event depends primarily on whether or not they think they can direct the outcome. They treat other people as objects or as competitors who are also out for themselves.

Opportunists tend to regard their bad behavior as legitimate in the cut and thrust of an eye-for-an-eye world. They reject feedback, externalize blame, and retaliate harshly. One can see this action logic in the early work of Larry Ellison (now CEO of Oracle). Ellison describes his managerial style at the start of his career as “management by ridicule.” “You’ve got to be good at intellectual intimidation and rhetorical bullying,” he once told Matthew Symonds of the Economist. “I’d excuse my behavior by telling myself I was just having ‘an open and honest debate.’ The fact is, I just didn’t know any better.”

Few Opportunists remain managers for long, unless they transform to more effective action logics (as Ellison has done). Their constant firefighting, their style of self-aggrandizement, and their frequent rule breaking is the antithesis of the kind of leader people want to work with for the long term. If you have worked for an Opportunist, you will almost certainly remember it as a difficult time. By the same token, corporate environments that breed opportunism seldom endure, although Opportunists often survive longer than they should because they provide an exciting environment in which younger executives, especially, can take risks. As one ex-Enron senior staffer said, “Before the fall, those were such exciting years. We felt we could do anything, pull off everything, write our own rules. The pace was wild, and we all just rode it.” Of course, Enron’s shareholders and pensioners would reasonably feel that they were paying too heavily for that staffer’s adventure.

The Diplomat

The Diplomat makes sense of the world around him in a more benign way than the Opportunist does, but this action logic can also have extremely negative repercussions if the leader is a senior manager. Loyally serving the group, the Diplomat seeks to please higher-status colleagues while avoiding conflict. This action logic is focused on gaining control of one’s own behavior—more than on gaining control of external events or other people. According to the Diplomat’s action logic, a leader gains more enduring acceptance and influence by cooperating with group norms and by performing his daily roles well.

In a support role or a team context, this type of executive has much to offer. Diplomats provide social glue to their colleagues and ensure that attention is paid to the needs of others, which is probably why the great majority of Diplomats work at the most junior rungs of management, in jobs such as frontline supervisor, customer service representative, or nurse practitioner. Indeed, research into 497 managers in different industries showed that 80% of all Diplomats were at junior levels. By contrast, 80% of all Strategists were at senior levels, suggesting that managers who grow into more effective action logics—like that of the Strategist—have a greater chance of being promoted.

Diplomats are much more problematic in top leadership roles because they try to ignore conflict. They tend to be overly polite and friendly and find it virtually impossible to give challenging feedback to others. Initiating change, with its inevitable conflicts, represents a grave threat to the Diplomat, and he will avoid it if at all possible, even to the point of self-destruction.

Initiating change, with its inevitable conflicts, represents a grave threat to the Diplomat, and he will avoid it if at all possible, even to the point of self-destruction.

Consider one Diplomat who became the interim CEO of an organization when his predecessor died suddenly from an aneurysm. When the board split on the selection of a permanent successor, it asked the Diplomat to carry on. Our Diplomat relished his role as a ceremonial figurehead and was a sought-after speaker at public events. Unfortunately, he found the more conflictual requirements of the job less to his liking. He failed, for instance, to replace a number of senior managers who had serious ongoing performance issues and were resisting the change program his predecessor had initiated. Because the changes were controversial, the Diplomat avoided meetings, even planning business trips for the times when the senior team would meet. The team members were so frustrated by the Diplomat’s attitude that they eventually resigned en masse. He “resolved” this crisis by thanking the team publicly for its contribution and appointing new team members. Eventually, in the face of mounting losses arising from this poor management, the board decided to demote the Diplomat to his former role as vice president.

The Expert

The largest category of leader is that of Experts, who account for 38% of all professionals in our sample. In contrast to Opportunists, who focus on trying to control the world around them, and Diplomats, who concentrate on controlling their own behavior, Experts try to exercise control by perfecting their knowledge, both in their professional and personal lives. Exercising watertight thinking is extremely important to Experts. Not surprisingly, many accountants, investment analysts, marketing researchers, software engineers, and consultants operate from the Expert action logic. Secure in their expertise, they present hard data and logic in their efforts to gain consensus and buy-in for their proposals.

Experts are great individual contributors because of their pursuit of continuous improvement, efficiency, and perfection. But as managers, they can be problematic because they are so completely sure they are right. When subordinates talk about a my-way-or-the-highway type of boss, they are probably talking about someone operating from an Expert action logic. Experts tend to view collaboration as a waste of time (“Not all meetings are a waste of time—some are canceled!”), and they will frequently treat the opinion of people less expert than themselves with contempt. Emotional intelligence is neither desired nor appreciated. As Sun Microsystems’ CEO Scott McNealy put it: “I don’t do feelings; I’ll leave that to Barry Manilow.”

It comes as no surprise, then, that after unsuccessfully pleading with him to scale back in the face of growing losses during the dot-com debacle of 2001 and 2002, nearly a dozen members of McNealy’s senior management team left.

The Achiever

For those who hope someday to work for a manager who both challenges and supports them and creates a positive team and interdepartmental atmosphere, the good news is that a large proportion, 30%, of the managers in our research measured as Achievers. While these leaders create a positive work environment and focus their efforts on deliverables, the downside is that their style often inhibits thinking outside the box.

Achievers have a more complex and integrated understanding of the world than do managers who display the three previous action logics we’ve described. They’re open to feedback and realize that many of the ambiguities and conflicts of everyday life are due to differences in interpretation and ways of relating. They know that creatively transforming or resolving clashes requires sensitivity to relationships and the ability to influence others in positive ways. Achievers can also reliably lead a team to implement new strategies over a one- to three-year period, balancing immediate and long-term objectives. One study of ophthalmologists in private practice showed that those who scored as Achievers had lower staff turnover, delegated more responsibility, and had practices that earned at least twice the gross annual revenues of those run by Experts.

Achievers often find themselves clashing with Experts. The Expert subordinate, in particular, finds the Achiever leader hard to take because he cannot deny the reality of the Achiever’s success even though he feels superior. Consider Hewlett-Packard, where the research engineers tend to score as Experts and the lab managers as higher-level Achievers. At one project meeting, a lab manager—a decided Achiever—slammed her coffee cup on the table and exclaimed, “I know we can get 18 features into this, but the customers want delivery some time this century, and the main eight features will do.” “Philistine!” snorted one engineer, an Expert. But this kind of conflict isn’t always destructive. In fact, it provides much of the fuel that has ignited—and sustained—the competitiveness of many of the country’s most successful corporations.

The Individualist

The Individualist action logic recognizes that neither it nor any of the other action logics are “natural”; all are constructions of oneself and the world. This seemingly abstract idea enables the 10% of Individualist leaders to contribute unique practical value to their organizations; they put personalities and ways of relating into perspective and communicate well with people who have other action logics.

What sets Individualists apart from Achievers is their awareness of a possible conflict between their principles and their actions, or between the organization’s values and its implementation of those values. This conflict becomes the source of tension, creativity, and a growing desire for further development.

Individualists also tend to ignore rules they regard as irrelevant, which often makes them a source of irritation to both colleagues and bosses. “So, what do you think?” one of our clients asked us as he was debating whether to let go of one of his star performers, a woman who had been measured as an Individualist. Sharon (not her real name) had been asked to set up an offshore shared service function in the Czech Republic in order to provide IT support to two separate and internally competitive divisions operating there. She formed a highly cohesive team within budget and so far ahead of schedule that she quipped that she was “delivering services before Group Business Risk had delivered its report saying it can’t be done.”

The trouble was that Sharon had a reputation within the wider organization as a wild card. Although she showed great political savvy when it came to her individual projects, she put many people’s noses out of joint in the larger organization because of her unique, unconventional ways of operating. Eventually, the CEO was called in (not for the first time) to resolve a problem created by her failure to acknowledge key organizational processes and people who weren’t on her team.

Many of the dynamics created by different action logics are illustrated by this story and its outcome. The CEO, whose own action logic was that of an Achiever, did not see how he could challenge Sharon to develop and move beyond creating such problems. Although ambivalent about her, he decided to retain her because she was delivering and because the organization had recently lost several capable, if unconventional, managers.

So Sharon stayed, but only for a while. Eventually, she left the company to set up an offshoring consultancy. When we examine in the second half of this article how to help executives transform their leadership action logics, we’ll return to this story to see how both Sharon and the CEO might have succeeded in transforming theirs.

The Strategist

Strategists account for just 4% of leaders. What sets them apart from Individualists is their focus on organizational constraints and perceptions, which they treat as discussable and transformable. Whereas the Individualist masters communication with colleagues who have different action logics, the Strategist masters the second-order organizational impact of actions and agreements. The Strategist is also adept at creating shared visions across different action logics—visions that encourage both personal and organizational transformations. According to the Strategist’s action logic, organizational and social change is an iterative developmental process that requires awareness and close leadership attention.

Strategists deal with conflict more comfortably than do those with other action logics, and they’re better at handling people’s instinctive resistance to change. As a result, Strategists are highly effective change agents. We found confirmation of this in our recent study of ten CEOs in six different industries. All of their organizations had the stated objective of transforming themselves and had engaged consultants to help with the process. Each CEO filled out a Leadership Development Profile, which showed that five of them were Strategists and the other five fell into other action logics. The Strategists succeeded in generating one or more organizational transformations over a four-year period; their companies’ profitability, market share, and reputation all improved. By contrast, only two of the other five CEOs succeeded in transforming their organizations—despite help from consultants, who themselves profiled as Strategists.

Strategists are fascinated with three distinct levels of social interplay: personal relationships, organizational relations, and national and international developments. Consider Joan Bavaria, a CEO who, back in 1985, measured as a Strategist. Bavaria created one of the first socially responsible investment funds, a new subdivision of the investments industry, which by the end of 2001 managed more than $3 trillion in funds. In 1982, Bavaria founded Trillium Asset Management, a worker-owned company, which she still heads. She also cowrote the CERES Environmental Principles, which dozens of major companies have signed. In the late 1990s, CERES, working with the United Nations, created the Global Reporting Initiative, which supports financial, social, and environmental transparency and accountability worldwide.

Here we see the Strategist action logic at work. Bavaria saw a unique moment in which to make ethical investing a viable business, then established Trillium to execute her plan. Strategists typically have socially conscious business ideas that are carried out in a highly collaborative manner. They seek to weave together idealist visions with pragmatic, timely initiatives and principled actions. Bavaria worked beyond the boundaries of her own organization to influence the socially responsible investment industry as a whole and later made the development of social and environmental accountability standards an international endeavor by involving the United Nations. Many Achievers will use their influence to successfully promote their own companies. The Strategist works to create ethical principles and practices beyond the interests of herself or her organization.

The Alchemist

The final leadership action logic for which we have data and experience is the Alchemist. Our studies of the few leaders we have identified as Alchemists suggest that what sets them apart from Strategists is their ability to renew or even reinvent themselves and their organizations in historically significant ways. Whereas the Strategist will move from one engagement to another, the Alchemist has an extraordinary capacity to deal simultaneously with many situations at multiple levels. The Alchemist can talk with both kings and commoners. He can deal with immediate priorities yet never lose sight of long-term goals.

What sets Alchemists apart from Strategists is their ability to renew or even reinvent themselves and their organizations in historically significant ways.

Alchemists constitute 1% of our sample, which indicates how rare it is to find them in business or anywhere else. Through an extensive search process, we found six Alchemists who were willing to participate in an up-close study of their daily actions. Though this is obviously a very small number that cannot statistically justify generalization, it’s worth noting that all six Alchemists shared certain characteristics. On a daily basis, all were engaged in multiple organizations and found time to deal with issues raised by each. However, they were not in a constant rush—nor did they devote hours on end to a single activity. Alchemists are typically charismatic and extremely aware individuals who live by high moral standards. They focus intensely on the truth. Perhaps most important, they’re able to catch unique moments in the history of their organizations, creating symbols and metaphors that speak to people’s hearts and minds. In one conservative financial services company in the UK, a recently appointed CEO turned up for work in a tracksuit instead of his usual pinstripes but said nothing about it to anyone. People wondered whether this was a new dress code. Weeks later, the CEO spoke publicly about his attire and the need to be unconventional and to move with greater agility and speed.

A more celebrated example of an Alchemist is Nelson Mandela. Although we never formally profiled Mandela, he exemplifies the Alchemist action logic. In 1995, Mandela symbolized the unity of a new South Africa when he attended the Rugby World Cup game in which the Springboks, the South African national team, were playing. Rugby had been the bastion of white supremacy, but Mandela attended the game. He walked on to the pitch wearing the Springboks’ jersey so hated by black South Africans, at the same time giving the clenched fist salute of the ANC, thereby appealing, almost impossibly, both to black and white South Africans. As Tokyo Sexwale, ANC activist and premier of South Africa’s Gauteng province, said of him: “Only Mandela could wear an enemy jersey. Only Mandela would go down there and be associated with the Springboks… All the years in the underground, in the trenches, denial, self-denial, away from home, prison, it was worth it. That’s all we wanted to see.”

Evolving as a Leader

The most remarkable—and encouraging—finding from our research is that leaders can transform from one action logic to another. We have, in fact, documented a number of leaders who have succeeded in transforming themselves from Experts into Achievers, from Achievers into Individualists, and from Individualists into Strategists.

Take the case of Jenny, one of our clients, who initially measured as an Expert. She became disillusioned with her role in her company’s PR department and resigned in order to, as she said, “sort out what I really want to do.” Six months later, she joined a different company in a similar role, and two years after that we profiled her again and she still measured as an Expert. Her decision to resign from the first company, take a “sabbatical,” and then join the second company had made no difference to her action logic. At that point, Jenny chose to join a group of peer leaders committed to examining their current leadership patterns and to experimenting with new ways of acting. This group favored the Strategist perspective (and the founder of the group was profiled as an Alchemist), which in the end helped Jenny’s development. She learned that her habit of consistently taking a critical position, which she considered “usefully objective,” isolated her and generated distrust. As a result of the peer group’s feedback, she started a series of small and private experiments, such as asking questions rather than criticizing. She realized that instead of seeing the faults in others, she had to be clear about what she could contribute and, in doing so, started the move from an Expert to an Achiever. Spiritually, Jenny learned that she needed an ongoing community of inquiry at the center of her life and found a spiritual home for continuing reflection in Quaker meetings, which later supported (and indeed signaled) her transition from an Achiever to an Individualist.

Two years later, Jenny left the second job to start her own company, at which point she began profiling as a Strategist. This was a highly unusual movement of three action logics in such a short time. We have had only two other instances in which a leader has transformed twice in less than four years.

As Jenny’s case illustrates, there are a number of personal changes that can support leadership transformation. Jenny experienced loss of faith in the system and feelings of boredom, irritability, burnout, depression, and even anger. She began to ask herself existential questions. But another indication of a leader’s readiness to transform is an increasing attraction to the qualities she begins to intuit in people with more effective action logics. Jenny, as we saw, was drawn to and benefited hugely from her Strategist peer group as well as from a mentor who exhibited the Alchemist action logic. This search for new perspectives often manifests itself in personal transformations: The ready-to-transform leader starts developing new relationships. She may also explore new forms of spiritual practice or new forms of centering and self-expression, such as playing a musical instrument or doing tai chi.

External events can also trigger and support transformation. A promotion, for example, may give a leader the opportunity to expand his or her range of capabilities. Earlier, we cited the frustration of Expert research engineers at Hewlett-Packard with the product and delivery attitude of Achiever lab managers. Within a year of one engineer’s promotion to lab manager, a role that required coordination of others and cooperation across departments, the former Expert was profiling as an Achiever. Although he initially took some heat (“Sellout!”) from his former buddies, his new Achiever awareness meant that he was more focused on customers’ needs and clearer about delivery schedules. For the first time, he understood the dance between engineers trying to perfect the technology and managers trying to deliver on budget and on schedule.

Changes to a manager’s work practices and environment can also facilitate transformation. At one company we studied, leaders changed from Achievers to Individualists partly because of simple organizational and process changes. At the company’s senior manager meetings, for example, executives other than the CEO had the chance to lead the meetings; these opportunities, which were supported by new spirit of openness, feedback, and frank debate, fostered professional growth among many of the company’s leaders.

Planned and structured development interventions are another means of supporting leadership transformation. We worked with a leading oil and gas exploration company on developing the already high-level capabilities of a pool of future senior managers; the managers were profiled and then interviewed by two consultants who explored each manager’s action logic and how it constrained and enabled him or her to perform current and recent roles. Challenges were discussed as well as a view of the individual’s potential and a possible developmental plan. After the exercise, several managers, whose Individualist and Strategist capabilities had not been fully understood by the company, were appreciated and engaged differently in their roles. What’s more, the organization’s own definition of leadership talent was reframed to include the capabilities of the Individualist and Strategist action logics. This in turn demanded that the company radically revisit its competency framework to incorporate such expectations as “sees issues from multiple perspectives” and “creates deep change without formal power.”

Now that we’ve looked generally at some of the changes and interventions that can support leadership development, let’s turn to some specifics about how the most common transformations are apt to take place.

From Expert to Achiever

This transformation is the most commonly observed and practiced among businesspeople and by those in management and executive education. For the past generation or more, the training departments of large companies have been supporting the development of managers from Experts into Achievers by running programs with titles like “Management by Objectives,” “Effective Delegation,” and “Managing People for Results.” These programs typically emphasize getting results through flexible strategies rather than through one right method used in one right way.

Observant leaders and executive coaches can also formulate well-structured exercises and questions related to everyday work to help Experts become aware of the different assumptions they and others may be making. These efforts can help Experts practice new conversational strategies such as, “You may be right, but I’d like to understand what leads you to believe that.” In addition, those wishing to push Experts to the next level should consider rewarding Achiever competencies like timely delivery of results, the ability to manage for performance, and the ability to implement strategic priorities.

Within business education, MBA programs are apt to encourage the development of the more pragmatic Achievers by frustrating the perfectionist Experts. The heavy workloads, use of multidisciplinary and ambiguous case studies, and teamwork requirements all promote the development of Achievers. By contrast, MSc programs, in particular disciplines such as finance or marketing research, tend to reinforce the Expert perspective.

Still, the transition from Expert to Achiever remains one of the most painful bottlenecks in most organizations. We’ve all heard the eternal lament of engineers, lawyers, and other professionals whose Expert success has saddled them with managerial duties, only to estrange them from the work they love. Their challenge becomes working as highly effective Achievers who can continue to use their in-depth expertise to succeed as leaders and managers.

From Achiever to Individualist

Although organizations and business schools have been relatively successful in developing leaders to the Achiever action logic, they have, with few exceptions, a dismal record in recognizing, supporting, and actively developing leaders to the Individualist and Strategist action logics, let alone to the Alchemist logic. This is not surprising. In many organizations, the Achiever, with his drive and focus on the endgame, is seen as the finish line for development: “This is a competitive industry—we need to keep a sharp focus on the bottom line.”

The development of leaders beyond the Achiever action logic requires a very different tack from that necessary to bring about the Expert-to-Achiever transformation. Interventions must encourage self-awareness on the part of the evolving leader as well as a greater awareness of other worldviews. In both business and personal relationships, speaking and listening must come to be experienced not as necessary, taken-for-granted ways of communicating predetermined ideas but as intrinsically forward-thinking, creative actions. Achievers use inquiry to determine whether they (and the teams and organization to which they belong) are accomplishing their goals and how they might accomplish them more effectively. The developing Individualist, however, begins to inquire about and reflect on the goals themselves—with the aim of improving future goals. Annual development plans that set new goals, are generated through probing and trusting conversation, are actively supported through executive coaching, and are carefully reviewed at the end of the cycle can be critical enablers at this point. Yet few boards and CEOs appreciate how valuable this time investment can be, and it is all too easily sacrificed in the face of short-term objectives, which can seem more pressing to leaders whose action logics are less developed.

Let’s go back to the case of Sharon, the Individualist we described earlier whose Achiever CEO wasn’t able to manage her. How might a coach or consultant have helped the CEO feel less threatened by Sharon and more capable of supporting her development while also being more open to his own needs and potential? One way would have been to try role-playing, asking the CEO to play Sharon while the coach or consultant enacts the CEO role. The role-playing might have gone as follows:

“Sharon, I want to talk with you about your future here at our company. Your completion of the Czech project under budget and ahead of time is one more sign that you have the initiative, creativity, and determination to make the senior team here. At the same time, I’ve had to pick up a number of pieces after you that I shouldn’t have had to. I’d like to brainstorm together about how you can approach future projects in a way that eliminates this hassle and gets key players on your side. Then, we can chat several times over the next year as you begin to apply whatever new principles we come up with. Does this seem like a good use of our time, or do you have a different perspective on the issue?”

Note that the consultant in the CEO’s role offers clear praise, a clear description of a limitation, a proposed path forward, and an inquiry that empowers the CEO (playing Sharon) to reframe the dilemma if he wishes. Thus, instead of giving the CEO one-way advice about what he should do, the coach enacts a dialogic scenario with him, illustrating a new kind of practice and letting the CEO judge whether the enacted relationship is a positive one. The point is not so much to teach the CEO a new conversational repertoire but to make him more comfortable with how the Individualist sees and makes sense of the world around her and what feedback may motivate her to commit to further learning. Such specific experiments with new ways of listening and talking can gradually dissolve the fears associated with transformational learning.

To Strategist and Beyond

Leaders who are moving toward the Strategist and Alchemist action logics are no longer primarily seeking personal skills that will make them more effective within existing organizational systems. They will already have mastered many of those skills. Rather, they are exploring the disciplines and commitments entailed in creating projects, teams, networks, strategic alliances, and whole organizations on the basis of collaborative inquiry. It is this ongoing practice of reframing inquiry that makes them and their corporations so successful.

The path toward the Strategist and Alchemist action logics is qualitatively different from other leadership development processes. For a start, emergent Strategists and Alchemists are no longer seeking mentors to help them sharpen existing skills and to guide them toward influential networks (although they may seek spiritual and ethical guidance from mentors). Instead, they are seeking to engage in mutual mentoring with peers who are already part of their networks (such as board members, top managers, or leaders within a scientific discipline). The objective of this senior-peer mentoring is not, in conventional terms, to increase the chances of success but to create a sustainable community of people who can challenge the emergent leader’s assumptions and practices and those of his company, industry, or other area of activity.

We witnessed just this kind of peer-to-peer development when one senior client became concerned that he, his company, and the industry as a whole were operating at the Achiever level. This concern, of course, was itself a sign of his readiness to transform beyond that logic. This executive—the CEO of a dental hygiene company—and his company were among the most successful of the parent company’s subsidiaries. However, realizing that he and those around him had been keeping their heads down, he chose to initiate a research project—on introducing affordable dental hygiene in developing countries—that was decidedly out of the box for him and for the corporation.

The CEO’s timing was right for such an initiative, and he used the opportunity to engage in collaborative inquiry with colleagues across the country. Eventually, he proposed an educational and charitable venture, which the parent company funded. The executive was promoted to a new vice presidency for international ventures within the parent company—a role he exercised with an increased sense of collaboration and a greater feeling of social responsibility for his company in emerging markets.

Formal education and development processes can also guide individuals toward a Strategist action logic. Programs in which participants act as leaders and challenge their conventional assumptions about leading and organizing are very effective. Such programs will be either long term (one or two years) or repeated, intense experiences that nurture the moment-to-moment awareness of participants, always providing the shock of dissonance that stimulates them to reexamine their worldviews. Path-breaking programs of this type can be found at a few universities and consultancies around the globe. Bath University in the UK, for instance, sponsors a two-year master’s degree in responsibility and business practice in which students work together during six one-week get-togethers. These programs involve small-learning teams, autobiographical writing, psychodrama, deep experiences in nature, and a yearlong business project that involves action and reflection. Interestingly, many people who attend these programs report that these experiences have had the transformative power of a life-altering event, such as a career or existential crisis or a new marriage.

Leadership Teams and Leadership Cultures Within Organizations

So far, our discussion has focused on the leadership styles of individuals. But we have found that our categories of leadership styles can be used to describe teams and organizations as well. Here we will talk briefly about the action logics of teams.

Over the long term, the most effective teams are those with a Strategist culture, in which the group sees business challenges as opportunities for growth and learning on the part of both individuals and the organization. A leadership team at one of the companies we worked with decided to invite managers from across departments to participate in time-to-market new product teams. Seen as a risky distraction, few managers volunteered, except for some Individualists and budding Strategists. However, senior management provided sufficient support and feedback to ensure the teams’ early success. Soon, the first participants were promoted and leading their own cross-departmental teams. The Achievers in the organization, seeing that others were being promoted, started volunteering for these teams. Gradually, more people within the organization were experiencing shared leadership, mutual testing of one another’s assumptions and practices, and individual challenges that contributed to their development as leaders.

Sadly, few companies use teams in this way. Most senior manager teams operate at the Achiever action logic—they prefer unambiguous targets and deadlines, and working with clear strategies, tactics, and plans, often against tight deadlines. They thrive in a climate of adversity (“When the going gets tough, the tough get going”) and derive great pleasure from pulling together and delivering. Typically, the team’s leaders and several other members will be Achievers, with several Experts and perhaps one or two Individualists or Strategists (who typically feel ignored). Such Achiever teams are often impatient at slowing down to reflect, are apt to dismiss questions about goals and assumptions as “endless philosophizing,” and typically respond with hostile humor to creative exercises, calling them “off-the-wall” diversions. These behaviors will ultimately limit an Achiever team’s success.

The situation is worse at large, mature companies where senior management teams operate as Experts. Here, vice presidents see themselves as chiefs and their “teams” as an information-reporting formality. Team life is bereft of shared problem-solving, decision-making, or strategy-formulating efforts. Senior teams limited by the Diplomat action logic are even less functional. They are characterized by strong status differences, undiscussable norms, and ritual “court” ceremonies that are carefully stage-managed.

Individualist teams, which are more likely to be found in creative, consulting, and nonprofit organizations, are relatively rare and very different from Achiever, Expert, and Diplomat teams. In contrast to Achiever teams, they may be strongly reflective; in fact, excessive time may be spent reviewing goals, assumptions, and work practices. Because individual concerns and input are very important to these teams, rapid decision making may be difficult.

But like individual people, teams can change their style. For instance, we’ve seen Strategist CEOs help Individualist senior teams balance action and inquiry and so transform into Strategist teams. Another example is an Achiever senior team in a financial services company we worked with that was emerging from two years of harsh cost cutting during a market downturn. To adapt to a changing and growing financial services market, the company needed to become significantly more visionary and innovative and learn how to engage its workforce. To lead this transformation, the team had to start with itself. We worked with it to help team members understand the constraints of the Achiever orientation, which required a number of interventions over time. We began by working to improve the way the team discussed issues and by coaching individual members, including the CEO. As the team evolved, it became apparent that its composition needed to change: Two senior executives, who had initially seemed ideally suited to the group because of their achievements, had to be replaced when it became clear that they were unwilling to engage and experiment with the new approach.

During this reorientation, which lasted slightly more than two years, the team became an Individualist group with emergent Strategist capabilities. The CEO, who had profiled at Achiever/Individualist, now profiled as a Strategist, and most other team members showed one developmental move forward. The impact of this was also felt in the team’s and organization’s ethos: Once functionally divided, the team learned to accept and integrate the diverse opinions of its members. Employee surveys reported increased engagement across the company. Outsiders began seeing the company as ahead of the curve, which meant the organization was better able to attract top talent. In the third year, bottom- and top-line results were well ahead of industry competitors.• • •

The leader’s voyage of development is not an easy one. Some people change little in their lifetimes; some change substantially. Despite the undeniably crucial role of genetics, human nature is not fixed. Those who are willing to work at developing themselves and becoming more self-aware can almost certainly evolve over time into truly transformational leaders. Few may become Alchemists, but many will have the desire and potential to become Individualists and Strategists. Corporations that help their executives and leadership teams examine their action logics can reap rich rewards.

Serving Powerfully Behind the Scenes

Laurie's Bio

• AT&T 30 years. Sales Leader & Chief of Staff to senior team
• Trusted Advisor to senior leaders and chiefs of staff/Founder of ChiefSpace
• At my core, I love helping the greats behind the greats get greater!
  

Most things get done because of chief involvement and most people never know it.  

• WE are the silent giants that often go unattended to, YET almost everything that gets accomplished has our involvement and leadership
• We work 24 x 7 – almost ALL of the time and know how to do it powerfully
• We spend more time developing relationships and trust because we KNOW that’s the foundation of how all things work, or NOT
• We are rarely, if ever,  the one in the spotlight and yet the one  hat the most senior leaders rely on the most to get things done
  

How to lead without authority (Laurie shares various examples illustrating each of these points).

• Focus on Outcomes
• Relationships + Trust = Influence
• Clear and succinct communication is a core competency
• Ask powerful questions – most answers lie in the questions themselves
• Take others with you from the start. Not about creating followers – about driving alignment which leads to progression.
  

Breakout rooms

What are you not doing yet in your role that if you
started applying tomorrow, could amplify your ability to
lead without authority?z

Key Takeaways: Company All Hands

Hosting All Hands:

• Have other people besides the exec team host all hands. This helps with visibility across the org and keeps people interested.

Content Suggestions:

• New Hires and Anniversaries
• Important Company-Wide Announcements
• Live Recognition, Praise, or Shoutouts
• Deep dive on Specific Departments
  • It’s helpful to template the department updates, so everyone knows what to expect and to keep people on track with timing.
  • If reviewing Goals/OKRs, keep it high level - Don’t get too in the weeds. People who are not in that specific department might get lost in the details.
• Company Business Review
• Financials Deep Dive (with explanations as to how this impacts people)
• Industry and Competitive Rundowns
• CEO shares what is inspiring them and their aspirations for the business
• CEO State of the Union
• Customer Quotes and Stories

Possible meeting structures:

• Weekly
  • Less formal content
  • Have different meeting types, so people know what to expect each week, such as:
    • Week 1: Leadership AMA
    • Week 2: Business and OKR Updates
    • Week 3: Panels or Lunch & Learns
    • Week 4: Department Takeovers
    • _It’s helpful to label the types of meetings that you are having on the calendar so people can get a preview of the agenda. _
• Monthly
• Quarterly
  • Higher quality of programming, more structured
  • Some of the less formal content that can be done at an all hands are often not included in all hands and called a different meeting at this cadence: Roadshows, Lunch and Learns, Community of Practice, Town Halls, AMAs

Meeting Followup:

• Make sure to send a note after all hands with a few quick bullets on what Exec wants people to take away from and absorb during all hands.
• Send a survey afterwards:
  • Do you understand the company’s vision? (Y, N, M)
  • Do you understand how the company is performing and what are are doing to improve? (Y, N, M)

Outline

Click on any section to jump to the relevant portion of the piece!

• [Rule #1: It’s Your Fault](https://firstround.com/review/The-Best-Approach-to-the-Worst-Conversation/#text_117b7a375cbb4168ae951d1b2dda2a9c:~:text=Rule %231%3A It’s Your Fault,If you’ve)
• [Tackle Performance Head On](https://firstround.com/review/The-Best-Approach-to-the-Worst-Conversation/#text_1c2ea9cd36414e9eb101f69208f063af:~:text=Tackle Performance Head On,PIP)
• [PIP for Real](https://firstround.com/review/The-Best-Approach-to-the-Worst-Conversation/#text_0fb915c63bef40e088f700bb6dfe06d7:~:text=PIP for Real,Sometimes)
• [The Toughest Conversation](https://firstround.com/review/The-Best-Approach-to-the-Worst-Conversation/#text_8b69460682364a2790d3057c20df96e0:~:text=The Toughest Conversation,Most)
• [Fix It Before It Starts](https://firstround.com/review/The-Best-Approach-to-the-Worst-Conversation/#text_87c93fb9aa714f059614f3ceca315a7f:~:text=Fix It Before It Starts,“The)

Key Takeaways: Managing EAs

Managing EAs:

• If you have never been in a supporting/administrative role before the goal is less about understanding their exact day to day and more about being a partner to help them succeed.

Preparing for an EA to join the team:

• Before an EA joins the team for the first time, it is helpful to spend some time working with your to do list and re-identifying items that they can take off your plate (as a CoS or as an Exec)
• Start a playbook - What does being an EA at X Company mean?
  • These aren't the tactical tasks they do. It is more about the goals and larger expectations for the role
• With a CoS and EA, it is often helpful to brand the team as Office of the (Exec)
  • When working within an ‘office’ structure it is important to clearly define each role and understand where you complement each other.

**Question Bank for Team Meetings or 1:1s: **

• What are you hearing around the org?
• What do you need from me?
• How can I best support you?
• Do you have the right tools and resources?
• How can we all help each other?
• What has been the most helpful to you in your role?
• What blockers are you having?
• What is not working? (In your role, or in your department)

Possible Meeting Structures:

• Daily stand ups for 15 minutes with Office of [Exec]
• Beginning and End of week check ins with Office of [Exec]
• Weekly Stand ups with Office of [Exec]

Reporting Structures:

• Many EAs prefer to report directly to their exec to build that partnership. However, they still like to be a team and meet regularly with other EAs in the org to thought-partner and build a community.
• If the exec isn’t going to be handling the performance management and career pathing portion for the EA, that might be when they report into a different person, such as a CoS or a centralized function.

Outline

Click on any section to jump to the relevant portion of the piece!

• [Understand the Different Types of Values](https://hbr.org/2002/07/make-your-values-mean-something#DFP_TITLE_pos2:~:text=Understand the Different Types of Values,urgency one of our core values.”)
• [Be Aggressively Authentic](https://hbr.org/2002/07/make-your-values-mean-something#DFP_IC_pos3:~:text=Be Aggressively Authentic,showed an insincere video promptly discovered.)
• [Own the Process](https://hbr.org/2002/07/make-your-values-mean-something#DFP_IC_pos3:~:text=Own the Process,to gather input and build consensus.)
• [Weave Core Values into Everything](https://hbr.org/2002/07/make-your-values-mean-something#DFP_IC_pos4:~:text=Weave Core Values into Everything,for every decision the company makes.)

As fledgling startups struggle to find their footing, tackling high visibility metrics becomes the main focus. But in Collin’s experience, simply pursuing progress isn’t enough — an extra dose of discipline around communication provides the accountability that makes those goals more likely to materialize.

For Collin, that discipline lies in the three carefully constructed emails she has sent with an almost frightening regularity since Front’s earliest days: a weekly update to the entire company, a note to her direct reports and a monthly update to her investors. Read on for a closer look at how she crafts them and why they’ve been critical to Front’s results.

TO: All users SUBJECT: Revenue update

As with most startups, Front’s early days were marked by an obsession with revenue. “We had no excuse if those numbers weren’t trending upwards. So I started sending a daily email to the team to bring that metric front and center. It explained how much revenue we added yesterday, what we did well and what didn't go so well,” says Collin.

“I soon changed it to a weekly email as that was a better cadence, but ever since I’ve sent this email every single week to our entire company. It always has the same structure and is sent around the same time. And I haven’t missed a single one in the past four years,” she says.

“In the first few years, I wrote this completely on my own and it probably took me about an hour,” says Collin. “This may seem like a lot of time for an early-stage founder to spend on an internal note every single week, but it was vital. Amid all the growing pains, people knew exactly what success meant and evaluated everything they did through the lens of ‘How can we make that number go up?’”

SENT FOLDER: Below you'll find an early example of the weekly emails Collin sends to the Front team.

SENT FOLDER: Here’s a more recent, real-world (and lightly scrubbed) example of how Collin's weekly email template has evolved over time as Front has scaled.

For Collin, there’s power — and pressure — from this kind of transparency. “Sharing the good, the bad and the ugly provides accountability and a forcing function. If you see numbers that are less than great, you’ll be tempted to make an excuse, point to another bright spot, or hold off on sharing until things improve,” she says. “Or you might shift gears and work on another project as a distraction. But you can’t afford to do that.”

Concentrate on a single metric. If it’s not improving, resist the easy comfort of letting up and focusing on something else. Stay the course.

TO: Direct reports SUBJECT: Goals for the week

As another exercise in accountability, a different email flies out of Collin’s inbox at 10am sharp every Monday morning: a note to her direct reports.

“I quickly run through all of my goals for the week. It’s not about telling your reports every single thing you’re going to do. Rather it's a chance to share what’s top-of-mind for you, which of course should be top-of-mind for them. More generally, it’s helpful to know how managers spend their time — often it’s a more of a black box instead. That’s also why I’ve made my calendar public and shared a deck that explains what I do all day as CEO of Front,” she says. This email habit also sets an example. “If I start to slip or if my weeks don’t ladder up to those big goals we’re focusing on, that sends the wrong message,” says Collin.

SENT FOLDER: Below is an example of Collin’s direct report email in action.

TO: Investors SUBJECT: Monthly update

Another one of Collin’s favorite tricks for bringing discipline to her communication is the update email she sends to Front’s investors. “I sent the same note every month for years, and only changed to quarterly after our Series B,” she says.

SENT FOLDER: Below you'll find an example of what Collin’s note to investors looks like in practice.

Collin’s faith in the power of demonstrating your focus to investors has only increased now that she’s on the other side of the table.

Outline

Click on any section to jump to the relevant portion of the piece!

[1. Approach conflict as a collaborator, not an adversary.](https://hbr.org/2017/08/high-performing-teams-need-psychological-safety-heres-how-to-create-it?registration=success#DFP_TITLE_pos2:~:text=So how can you increase psychological,we achieve a mutually desirable outcome%3F”)

[2. Speak human to human.](https://hbr.org/2017/08/high-performing-teams-need-psychological-safety-heres-how-to-create-it?registration=success#DFP_TITLE_pos2:~:text=2. Speak human to human. Underlying,Anticipate reactions and plan countermoves. “Thinking)

[3. Anticipate reactions and plan countermoves.](https://hbr.org/2017/08/high-performing-teams-need-psychological-safety-heres-how-to-create-it?registration=success#DFP_TITLE_pos2:~:text=3. Anticipate reactions and plan countermoves.,respond to each of those scenarios%3F)

[4. Replace blame with curiosity.](https://hbr.org/2017/08/high-performing-teams-need-psychological-safety-heres-how-to-create-it?registration=success#DFP_IC_pos3:~:text=4. Replace blame with curiosity. If,is%3A “How could I support you%3F”)

[5. Ask for feedback on delivery.](https://hbr.org/2017/08/high-performing-teams-need-psychological-safety-heres-how-to-create-it?registration=success#DFP_IC_pos3:~:text=5. Ask for feedback on delivery.,I had%2C which led to solutions.”)

[6. Measure psychological safety](https://hbr.org/2017/08/high-performing-teams-need-psychological-safety-heres-how-to-create-it?registration=success#DFP_IC_pos3:~:text=6. Measure psychological safety. Santagata periodically,and development opportunities%2C and better performance.)

Outline

Click on any section to jump to the relevant portion of the piece!

• [The side-effect of empathy](https://medium.com/s/please-advise/the-essential-guide-to-difficult-conversations-41f736e63ccf#e58b:~:text=The side-effect of empathy,Empathy means)
• [Nonviolent communication](https://medium.com/s/please-advise/the-essential-guide-to-difficult-conversations-41f736e63ccf#0f21:~:text=seat.-,Nonviolent communication,“Nonviolent Communication” (NVC),-is an awful name for one of the most powerful communication courses I’ve ever taken as a manager. NVC helps you to be honest without criticizing%2C insulting%2C or putting down other people.)
• [The 40-word rule](https://medium.com/s/please-advise/the-essential-guide-to-difficult-conversations-41f736e63ccf#faaf:~:text=The 40-word rule,During difficult conversations%2C)
• [How to react when your request is met with “no”](https://medium.com/s/please-advise/the-essential-guide-to-difficult-conversations-41f736e63ccf#43ab:~:text=How to react when your request,person would say%2C “Yes%2C of course.”)
• [Boundaries and consequences](https://medium.com/s/please-advise/the-essential-guide-to-difficult-conversations-41f736e63ccf#7f30:~:text=Boundaries and consequences,outline the consequences of crossing them.)
• [Compassionate leadership](https://medium.com/s/please-advise/the-essential-guide-to-difficult-conversations-41f736e63ccf#59e1:~:text=Compassionate leadershipleadership is in being able to empathize with others while also empathizing with yourself. This helps you to communicate more directly and to better manage healthy conflict. It can even make you a better designer%2C marketer%2C and salesperson.)

Outline

Click on any section to jump to the relevant portion of the piece!

• [Iterate your culture the same way you iterate your business model](https://blog.ycombinator.com/making-culture-a-tangible-metric/#footnoteid4:~:text=Iterate your culture the same way,In)
• [Culture isn’t a buzzword, it’s your people](https://blog.ycombinator.com/making-culture-a-tangible-metric/#footnoteid4:~:text=Culture isn’t a buzzword%2C it’s your,By)
• [Talk to your customers employees](https://blog.ycombinator.com/making-culture-a-tangible-metric/#footnoteid4:~:text=Talk to your customers employees,When)
• [Founder influence isn’t sustainable](https://blog.ycombinator.com/making-culture-a-tangible-metric/#footnoteid4:~:text=Founder influence isn’t sustainable,The default)
• [‘Fire fast’ is overly binary](https://blog.ycombinator.com/making-culture-a-tangible-metric/#footnoteid4:~:text=‘Fire fast’ is overly binary,Too)
• [Be the mosaic, not a melting pot](https://blog.ycombinator.com/making-culture-a-tangible-metric/#footnoteid4:~:text=Be the mosaic%2C not a melting,In)
• [Full Set of Feedback Interview Questions:](https://blog.ycombinator.com/making-culture-a-tangible-metric/#footnoteid4:~:text=Full Set of Feedback Interview Questions%3A,• Do)

Outline

Click on any section to jump to the relevant portion of the piece!

• [What Is Radical Candor?](https://firstround.com/review/radical-candor-the-surprising-secret-to-being-a-good-boss/#text_e34611dcb4774cf9b93371150a86b85d:~:text=.',What Is Radical Candor%3F)
• [Consider Your Alternatives to Make the Best Choice](https://firstround.com/review/radical-candor-the-surprising-secret-to-being-a-good-boss/#text_bc4a24dc9f4f4943b847bf65d72e4774:~:text=Consider Your Alternatives to Make the,how to talk. This is hard.)
• [Encourage Your Whole Team to be Radically Candid](https://firstround.com/review/radical-candor-the-surprising-secret-to-being-a-good-boss/#text_0dba7fa2ee7d4a538bcedcec0068ac8b:~:text=Encourage Your Whole Team to be,be mean%2C but to help him.”)

Outline

Click on any section to jump to the relevant portion of the piece!

• Performance Management At Startups

• [Performance Management](https://quip.com/MwcgA10sGgFC#list-e-58-0:~:text=document.-,Performance Management,Giving,-and receiving performance feedback is a crucial part of career development. In startup culture%2C where things move at a frenetic pace%2C it doesn’t make sense for anyone to wait a year to find out where they stand in terms of performance. Employees need constant feedback so they can adjust their behavior and make improvements or modifications. If no feedback is given by managers or peers for an entire year%2C too much time goes by without feedback and without alignment on goals and how to measure success.)

• [Goal Setting… The New OKR](https://quip.com/MwcgA10sGgFC#list-e-43-0:~:text=processes-,GOAL SETTING… THE NEW OKR,There are strong business reasons to set goals%3A,-Organizations that use formal goal setting exercises are 3.5X more likely to be in the top tier of financial performers every year.)

• [Getting Feedback](https://quip.com/MwcgA10sGgFC#list-e-37-0:~:text=GETTING FEEDBACK,Getting feedback)

• 1:1 Meetings - A Good Place To Get Feedback,1%3A1%20MEETINGS%20%2D%20A%20GOOD%20PLACE%20TO%20GET%20FEEDBACK,-For%20starters%2C%20managers%20should%20be%20having)

• [Giving Feedback](https://quip.com/MwcgA10sGgFC#list-e-14-0:~:text=up.-,GIVING FEEDBACK,Giving)

• [Performance Management Tools](https://quip.com/MwcgA10sGgFC#list-e-211-0:~:text=meeting.-,Performance Management Tools,Performance Management,-Tools help companies align their resources%2C systems and employees with their strategic objectives and priorities. In simpler terms%2C they offer a way to gather and calibrate feedback for employees and set and track individual and company goals.)

• [How Performance Impacts Compensation](https://quip.com/MwcgA10sGgFC#list-e-165-0:~:text=http%3A%2F%2Ffirstround.com%2Freview%2Fbetterment-tested-three-performance-management-systems-so-you-dont-have-to%2F-,How Performance Impacts Compensation,Homebrew,-advises startups to adhere to a simple philosophy around compensation increases or raises. Unless an employee’s job changes%2C his or her salary shouldn’t change. Raises should be given when there is a promotion or change in scope of someone’s role.)

• [Bonus Plans](https://quip.com/MwcgA10sGgFC#list-e-165-0:~:text=detail.-,BONUS PLANS,Employees,-in non-revenue generating roles (everyone but salespeople) will likely not have an individual or company bonus as part of their compensation plan. Startups are usually cash constrained and employees are rewarded with equity%2C which is a longer term incentive. Once a company becomes profitable%2C then it is time to set up a company wide bonus plan.)

• [Spot Bonus Plan](https://quip.com/MwcgA10sGgFC#list-e-131-0:~:text=strategy.-,SPOT BONUS PLAN,Spot)

• [Peer Bonus Plan](https://quip.com/MwcgA10sGgFC#list-e-131-0:~:text=bonuses.-,PEER BONUS PLAN,Some companies)

• [Stock Refresh](https://quip.com/MwcgA10sGgFC#list-e-131-0:~:text=bonuses.-,STOCK REFRESH,Additional,-equity grants (otherwise known as refresher grants) should be based on performance and not awarded until an employee’s 2 year anniversary (assuming there is no change in title or performance). Seniority is a factor to consider. We recommend refreshing employees at the Director level and above at the 2 year mark and below the Director level at the 3 year mark. The most important thing is to have a defined philosophy around compensation and equity upfront. Be consistent and do not be afraid to enforce this policy.)

• Final Thoughts….-,Final%20thoughts%E2%80%A6,The)

Outline

Read the complete article here→

Click on any section to jump to the relevant portion of the piece!

1. Why Discipline — Not Vision — Goes The Distance
2. Disciplined Communication: The Three Emails Every Founder Should Send
3. Finding Focus In The Calendar: Time Management Tricks
4. Focused Fundraising: The Secrets To Lightning Rounds
5. Disciplined Team Building: Highlight Impact (And Stage An Office Musical)
6. In summary
   

Valve is definitely not a traditional company, and that's reflected in their company handbook.

Outline

• [Introduction](https://frontapp.com/blog/culture-book#gatsby-focus-wrapper:~:text=Introduction,a Fronteer is something pretty special.)

• [A letter from Mathilde](https://frontapp.com/blog/culture-book#gatsby-focus-wrapper:~:text=A letter from Mathilde,Dear Fronteers%2C)

• [Our Values](https://Our Values Transparency)

• Transparency

• Collaboration

• High Standards

• Care

• Low Ego

• [Inclusion](https://Inclusion As a reflection of our mission and values, we care deeply about creating an inclusive workplace where anyone can belong and be professionally fulfilled. There is still a lot we need and intend to do to create a more diverse workforce, but our values have given us a strong foundation to build upon.)

• [How will I be successful at Front?](https://frontapp.com/blog/culture-book#gatsby-focus-wrapper:~:text=How will I be successful at,fulfilled by their work at Front.)

Outline

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1. Compound yourself

2. Have almost too much self-belief

3. Learn to think independently

4. Get good at “sales”

5. Make it easy to take risks

6. Focus

7. Work hard

8. Be bold

9. Be willful

10. Be hard to compete with

11. Build a network

12. You get rich by owning things

13. Be internally driven

Entertainment, like friendship, is a fundamental human need; it changes how we feel and gives us common ground. We want to entertain the world. If we succeed, there is more laughter, more empathy, and more joy.

To get there, we have an amazing and unusual employee culture. This document is about that culture.

Like all great companies, we strive to hire the best and we value integrity, excellence, respect, inclusion, and collaboration. What is special about Netflix, though, is how much we:

1. encourage independent decision-making by employees
2. share information openly, broadly, and deliberately
3. are extraordinarily candid with each other
4. keep only our highly effective people
5. avoid rules

Our core philosophy is people over process. More specifically, we have great people working together as a dream team. With this approach, we are a more flexible, fun, stimulating, creative, collaborative and successful organization.

Real Values

Many companies have value statements, but often these written values are vague and ignored. The real values of a firm are shown by who gets rewarded or let go. Below are our values, the specific behaviors and skills we care about most. The more these values sound like you, and describe people you want to work with, the more likely you will thrive at Netflix.

Judgment

• You make wise decisions despite ambiguity
• You identify root causes, and get beyond treating symptoms
• You think strategically, and can articulate what you are, and are not, trying to do
• You are good at using data to inform your intuition
• You make decisions based on the long term, not near term

Communication

• You are concise and articulate in speech and writing
• You listen well and seek to understand before reacting
• You maintain calm poise in stressful situations to draw out the clearest thinking
• You adapt your communication style to work well with people from around the world who may not share your native language
• You provide candid, helpful, timely feedback to colleagues

Curiosity

• You learn rapidly and eagerly
• You contribute effectively outside of your specialty
• You make connections that others miss
• You seek to understand our members around the world, and how we entertain them
• You seek alternate perspectives
• You say what you think, when it’s in the best interest of Netflix, even if it is uncomfortable
• You make tough decisions without agonizing
• You take smart risks and are open to possible failure
• You question actions inconsistent with our values
• You are able to be vulnerable, in search of truth
• You inspire others with your thirst for excellence
• You care intensely about our members and Netflix‘s success
• You are tenacious and optimistic
• You are quietly confident and openly humble

Selflessness

• You seek what is best for Netflix, rather than what is best for yourself or your group
• You are open-minded in search of great ideas
• You make time to help colleagues
• You share information openly and proactively

Innovation

• You create new ideas that prove useful
• You re-conceptualize issues to discover solutions to hard problems
• You challenge prevailing assumptions, and suggest better approaches
• You keep us nimble by minimizing complexity and finding time to simplify
• You thrive on change

Inclusion

• You collaborate effectively with people of diverse backgrounds and cultures
• You nurture and embrace differing perspectives to make better decisions
• You are curious about how our different backgrounds affect us at work, rather than pretending they don’t affect us
• You recognize we all have biases, and work to grow past them
• You intervene if someone else is being marginalized

Integrity

• You are known for candor, authenticity, transparency, and being non-political
• You only say things about fellow employees that you say to their face
• You admit mistakes freely and openly
• You treat people with respect regardless of their status or disagreement with you
• You accomplish amazing amounts of important work
• You demonstrate consistently strong performance so colleagues can rely upon you
• You make your colleagues better
• You focus on results over process

It’s easy to write admirable values; it’s harder to live them. In describing courage we say, “You question actions inconsistent with our values.” We want everyone to help each other live the values and hold each other responsible for being role models. It is a continuous aspirational stretch.

In describing integrity we say, “You only say things about fellow employees you say to their face.” This attribute is one of the hardest for new people to believe — and to learn to practice. In most situations, both social and work, those who consistently say what they really think about people are quickly isolated and banished. We work hard to get people to give each other professional, constructive feedback - up, down and across the organization - on a continual basis. Leaders demonstrate that we are all fallible and open to feedback. People frequently ask others, “What could I be doing better?” and themselves, “What feedback have I not yet shared?”

We believe we will learn faster and be better if we can make giving and receiving feedback less stressful and a more normal part of work life. Feedback is a continuous part of how we communicate and work with one another versus an occasional formal exercise. We build trust by being selfless in giving feedback to our colleagues, even if it is uncomfortable to do so. Feedback helps us to avoid sustained misunderstandings and the need for rules. Feedback is more easily exchanged if there is a strong underlying relationship and trust between people, which is part of why we invest time in developing those professional relationships. We celebrate the people who are very candid, especially to those in more powerful positions. We know this level of candor and feedback can be difficult for new hires and people in different parts of the world where direct feedback is uncommon. We actively help people learn how to do this at Netflix through coaching and modeling the behaviors we want to see in every employee.

Dream Team

A dream team1 is one in which all of your colleagues are extraordinary at what they do and are highly effective collaborators. The value and satisfaction of being on a dream team is tremendous. Our version of the great workplace is not sushi lunches, great gyms, fancy offices, or frequent parties. Our version of the great workplace is a dream team in pursuit of ambitious common goals, for which we spend heavily. It is on such a team that you learn the most, perform your best work, improve the fastest, and have the most fun.

To have an entire company comprise the dream team (rather than just a few small groups) is challenging. Unquestionably, we have to hire well. We also have to foster collaboration, embrace a diversity of viewpoints, support information sharing, and discourage politics. The unusual part is that we give adequate performers a generous2 severance package so that we can find a star for that position. If you think of a professional sports team, it is up to the coach to ensure that every player on the field is amazing at their position, and plays very effectively with the others. We model ourselves on being a team, not a family. A family is about unconditional love, despite, say, your siblings’ bad behavior. A dream team is about pushing yourself to be the best teammate you can be, caring intensely about your teammates, and knowing that you may not be on the team forever.

We have no bell curves or rankings or quotas such as “cut the bottom 10% every year.” That would be detrimental to fostering collaboration, and is a simplistic, rules-based approach we would never support. We focus on managers’ judgment through the “keeper test” for each of their people: if one of the members of the team was thinking of leaving for another firm, would the manager try hard to keep them from leaving? Those who do not pass the keeper test (i.e. their manager would not fight to keep them) are promptly and respectfully given a generous severance package so we can find someone for that position that makes us an even better dream team. Getting cut from our team is very disappointing, but there is no shame. Being on a dream team can be the thrill of a professional lifetime.

Given our dream team orientation, it is very important that managers communicate frequently with each of their team members about where they stand so surprises are rare. Also, it is safe for any employee at any time to check in with their manager by asking, “How hard would you work to change my mind if I were thinking of leaving?” In the tension between honesty and kindness, we lean into honesty. No matter how honest, though, we treat people with respect.

One might assume that with dream team focus, people are afraid of making mistakes. In fact, it’s the opposite. We try all kinds of things and make plenty of mistakes as we search for improvement. The keeper test is applied as a judgment of someone’s overall expected contribution.

Within a dream team, collaboration and trust work well because your colleagues are both exceptionally skilled at what they do, and at working well with others. In describing selflessness we say “You make time to help colleagues. You share information openly and proactively.” We want new colleagues to feel very welcome and get all the support they need to be effective.

People like loyalty, and it is great as a stabilizer. Employees with a strong track record at Netflix get leeway if their performance takes a temporary dip. Similarly, we ask employees to stick with Netflix through any short term dips. But unconditional allegiance to a stagnant firm, or to a merely-adequately-performing employee, is not what we are about.

On a dream team, there are no “brilliant jerks.” The cost to teamwork is just too high. Our view is that brilliant people are also capable of decent human interactions, and we insist upon that. When highly capable people work together in a collaborative context, they inspire each other to be more creative, more productive and ultimately more successful as a team than they could be as a collection of individuals.

Succeeding on a dream team is about being effective, not about working hard. Sustained “B” performance, despite an “A” for effort, gets a respectful severance package. Sustained “A” performance, even with a modest level of effort, gets rewarded. Of course, to be great, most of us have to put in considerable effort, but hard work and long hours is not how we measure or talk about a person’s contribution.

Being on a dream team is not right for everyone, and that is OK. Many people value job security very highly, and would prefer to work at companies whose orientation is more about stability, seniority, and working around inconsistent employee effectiveness. Our model works best for people who highly value consistent excellence in their colleagues.

To help us attract and retain stunning colleagues, we pay employees at the top of their personal market. We make a good-faith estimate of the highest compensation each employee could make at peer firms, and pay them that maximum. Typically, we calibrate to market once a year. We do not think of these as “raises” and there is no raise pool to divide up. The market for talent is what it is. We avoid the model of “2% raise for adequate, 4% raise for great”. Some employees’ market value will rapidly rise (due both to their performance and to a shortage of talent in their areas) while other employees may be flat year-to-year, despite doing great work. At all times, we aim to pay all of our people at the top of their personal market.

Note that if our company experienced financial difficulty, we wouldn’t ask our employees to accept less pay. A sports team with a losing record still pays top of personal market for the players they hope will get them back into a winning position. On the other hand, if the company does well, our broadly distributed stock options become quite valuable.

Ultimately, your economic security is based on your skills and reputation, not on your seniority at one company. At Netflix, you learn a lot working on hard problems with amazing colleagues, and what you learn increases your market value. Knowing that other companies would quickly hire you if you left Netflix is comforting. We see occasional outside interviewing as healthy, and encourage employees to talk with their managers about what they learn in the process.

While our teammates are fantastic, and we work together very well, we know we can always do better. We strive to have calm confidence, and yet yearn to improve. We suck compared to how great we want to become.

Freedom and Responsibility

There are companies where people ignore trash on the floor in the office, leaving it for someone else to pick it up, and there are companies where people in the office lean down to pick up the trash they see, as they would at home. We try hard to be the latter, a company where everyone feels a sense of responsibility to do the right thing to help the company at every juncture. Picking up the trash is the metaphor for taking care of problems, small and large, and never thinking “that’s not my job.” We don’t have rules about picking up the real or metaphoric trash. We try to create a sense of ownership so that this behavior comes naturally.

Our goal is to inspire people more than manage them. We trust our teams to do what they think is best for Netflix — giving them lots of freedom, power, and information in support of their decisions. In turn, this generates a sense of responsibility and self-discipline that drives us to do great work that benefits the company.

We believe that people thrive on being trusted, on freedom, and on being able to make a difference. So we foster freedom and empowerment wherever we can.

In many organizations, there is an unhealthy emphasis on process and not much freedom. These organizations didn’t start that way, but the python of process squeezed harder every time something went wrong. Specifically, many organizations have freedom and responsibility when they are small. Everyone knows each other, and everyone picks up the trash. As they grow, however, the business gets more complex, and sometimes the average talent and passion level goes down. As the informal, smooth-running organization starts to break down, pockets of chaos emerge, and the general outcry is to “grow up” and add traditional management and process to reduce the chaos. As rules and procedures proliferate, the value system evolves into rule following (i.e. that is how you get rewarded). If this standard management approach is done well, then the company becomes very efficient at its business model — the system is dummy-proofed, and creative thinkers are told to stop questioning the status quo. This kind of organization is very specialized and well adapted to its business model. Eventually, however, over 10 to 100 years, the business model inevitably has to change, and most of these companies are unable to adapt.

To avoid the rigidity of over-specialization, and avoid the chaos of growth, while retaining freedom, we work to have as simple a business as we can given our growth ambitions, and to keep employee excellence rising. We work to have a company of self-disciplined people who discover and fix issues without being told to do so.

We are dedicated to increasing employee3 freedom to fight the python of process. Some examples of how we operate with unusual amounts of freedom are:

• We share documents internally broadly and systematically. Nearly every document is fully open for anyone to read and comment on, and everything is cross-linked. Memos on each title’s performance, on every strategy decision, on every competitor, and on every product feature test are open for all employees to read. There are some leaks, but the value of highly-informed employees is well worth it.
• There are virtually no spending controls and few contract signing controls. Each employee is expected to seek advice and perspective as appropriate. “Use good judgment” is our core precept.
• Our policy for travel, entertainment, gifts, and other expenses is 5 words long: “act in Netflix’s best interest.”
• Our vacation policy is “take vacation.” We don’t have any rules or forms around how many weeks per year. Frankly, we intermix work and personal time quite a bit, doing email at odd hours, taking off a weekday afternoon, etc. Our leaders make sure they set good examples by taking vacations, often coming back with fresh ideas, and encourage the rest of the team to do the same.
• Our parental leave policy is: “take care of your baby and yourself.” New parents generally take 4-8 months.
• Each employee chooses each year how much of their compensation they want in salary versus stock options. You can choose all cash, all options, or whatever combination suits you. You choose how much risk and upside you want. These 10-year stock options are fully-vested and you keep them even if you leave Netflix.

4

• There are no compensation handcuffs (vesting) requiring you to stay in order to get your money. People are free to leave at any time, without loss of money, and yet they overwhelmingly choose to stay. We want managers to create conditions where people love being here, for the great work and great pay.

You might think that such freedom would lead to chaos. But we also don’t have a clothing policy, yet no one has come to work naked. The lesson is you don’t need policies for everything. Most people understand the benefits of wearing clothes at work.

There are a few important exceptions to our anti-rules pro-freedom philosophy. We are strict about ethical issues and safety issues. Harassment of employees or trading on insider information are zero tolerance issues, for example. Some information security issues, such as keeping our members’ payment information safe, have strict controls around access. Transferring large amounts of cash from our company bank accounts has strict controls. But these are edge cases.

In general, freedom and rapid recovery is better than trying to prevent error. We are in a creative business, not a safety-critical business. Our big threat over time is lack of innovation, so we should be relatively error tolerant. Rapid recovery is possible if people have great judgment. The seduction is that error prevention just sounds so good, even if it is often ineffective. We are always on guard if too much error prevention hinders inventive, creative work.

On rare occasion, freedom is abused. We had one senior employee who organized kickbacks on IT contracts for example. But those are the exceptions, and we avoid over-correcting. Just because a few people abuse freedom doesn’t mean that our employees are not worthy of great trust.

Some processes are about increased productivity, rather than error avoidance, and we like process that helps us get more done. One such process we do well is effective scheduled meetings. We have a regular cadence of many types of meetings; we start and end on time, and have well-prepared agendas. We use these meetings to learn from each other and get more done, rather than to prevent errors or approve decisions.

Informed Captains

For every significant decision there is a responsible captain of the ship who makes a judgment call after sharing and digesting others’ views. We avoid committees making decisions because that would slow us down, and diffuse responsibility and accountability. We farm for dissent; dissent is not natural or easy, which is why we make a concerted effort to stimulate it. Many times, groups will meet about topics and debate them, but then afterwards someone needs to make a decision and be that “captain”. Small decisions may be shared just by email, larger ones will merit a memo with discussion of the various positions, and why the captain made such a decision. The bigger a decision, the more extensive the dissent/assent gathering should be, usually in an open shared document. We are clear, however, that decisions are not made by a majority or committee vote. We don’t wait for consensus, nor do we drive to rapid, uninformed decision making. When the captain of any particular decision is reasonably confident of the right bet for us to take, they decide and we take that bet. Afterwards, as the impact becomes clearer, we reflect on the decision, and see if we could do even better in the future.

Disagree Openly

If you disagree on a material issue, it is your responsibility to explain why you disagree, ideally in both discussion and in writing. The back and forth of discussion can clarify the different views, and concise writing of the core issues helps people reflect on what is the wise course, as well as making it easy to share your views widely. The informed captain on that decision has the responsibility to welcome, understand, and consider your opinions, but may not agree. Once the captain makes a decision, we expect everyone to help make it as successful as possible. Later, if significant new information becomes available, it is fine to ask the captain to revisit the topic. Silent disagreement is unacceptable and unproductive.

Context not Control

We want employees to be great independent decision makers, and to only consult their manager when they are unsure of the right decision. The leader's job at every level is to set clear context so that others have the right information to make generally great decisions.

We don’t buy into the lore of CEOs, or other senior leaders, who are so involved in the details that their product or service becomes amazing. The legend of Steve Jobs was that his micromanagement made the iPhone a great product. Others take it to new extremes, proudly calling themselves nano-managers. The heads of major networks and studios sometimes make many decisions in the creative process of their content. We do not emulate these top-down models because we believe we are most effective and innovative when employees throughout the company make and own decisions.

We strive to develop good decision-making muscles everywhere in our company. We pride ourselves on how few, not how many, decisions senior management makes. We don’t want hands-off management, though. Each leader's role is to teach, to set context, and to be highly informed of what is actually happening. The only way to figure out how the context setting needs to improve is to explore a sample of the details. But unlike the micro-manager, the goal of knowing those details is not to change certain small decisions, but to learn how to adjust context so more decisions are made well.

There are some minor exceptions to “context not control,” such as an urgent situation in which there is no time to think about proper context and principles, or when a new team member hasn’t yet absorbed enough context to be confident, or when it’s recognized that the wrong person is in a decision-making role (temporarily, no doubt).

We tell people not to seek to please their boss. Instead, seek to serve the business. It’s OK to disagree with your manager. It’s never OK to hide anything. It’s OK to say to your manager, “I know you disagree, but I’m going to do X because I think it is a better solution. Let me know if you want to specifically override my decision.” What we don’t want is people guessing what their manager would do or want, and then executing on that guess.

Highly Aligned, Loosely Coupled

As companies grow, they often become highly centralized and inflexible. Symptoms include:

• Senior management is involved in many small decisions
• There are numerous cross-departmental buy-in meetings to socialize tactics
• Pleasing other internal groups takes precedence over pleasing customers
• The organization is highly coordinated and less prone to error, but slow and frustrating

We avoid this by being highly aligned and loosely coupled. We spend lots of time debating strategy together, and then trust each other to execute on tactics without prior approvals. Often, two groups working on the same goals won’t know of, or have approval over, their peer activities. If, later, the activities don’t seem right, we have a candid discussion. We may find that the strategy was too vague or the tactics were not aligned with the agreed strategy. And we discuss generally how we can do better in the future.

The success of a “Highly Aligned, Loosely Coupled” work environment is dependent upon the collaborative efforts of high performance individuals and effective context. Ultimately, the end goal is to grow the business for bigger impact while increasing flexibility and agility. We seek to be big, fast and nimble.

Seeking Excellence

New employees often comment in their first few months that they are surprised at how accurate this culture description is to the actual culture they experience. Around the world, we live and create our culture together. In fact, hundreds of our global employees contributed to this document.

We do not seek to preserve our culture — we seek to improve it. Every person who joins us helps to shape and evolve the culture further. We find new ways to accomplish more together. Every few years we can feel a real difference in how much more effectively we are operating than in the past. We are learning faster than ever because we have more dedicated people with diverse perspectives trying to find better ways for our talented team to work together more cohesively, nimbly and effectively.

Summary

As we wrote in the beginning, what is special about Netflix is how much we:

1. encourage independent decision-making by employees
2. share information openly, broadly, and deliberately
3. are extraordinarily candid with each other
4. keep only our highly effective people

Finally

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince, shows us the way:

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

1 We mean the team of your dreams, not the 1992 men’s USA Olympic basketball team.

2 We generally offer a minimum of four months of full pay as a severance package, giving our ex-teammates time to find a new company.

3 Mostly for our salaried employees; there are many limitations on this for our hourly employees due to legal requirements.

4 Sadly, a few countries’ tax laws do not support employee choice (Singapore, Japan, France, Korea, Taiwan)

Outline

Click on any section to jump to the relevant portion of the piece!

• [Why do we exist?](https://husney.com/the-narrative-driven-organization-17/#post-17:~:text=Purpose and Principles%3A Why We Exist)
• [Who do we serve?](https://husney.com/the-narrative-driven-organization-17/#post-17:~:text=Who We Serve%3A Casting Our Customers)
• [How do we serve them?](https://husney.com/the-narrative-driven-organization-17/#post-17:~:text=How We Serve Them%3A The Storyboard)
• [Who do we need and how do they operate?](https://husney.com/the-narrative-driven-organization-17/#post-17:~:text=Who We Need%3A Allocating Your Team,let’s see how we’d form teams.)
• [How do we track our progress toward our purpose?](https://husney.com/the-narrative-driven-organization-17/#post-17:~:text=Doing the Work)

A great deal of your fulfillment at any company is determined by the extent to which the values of the people and the organization align with your own.

It’s hard to assess culture from the outside and most companies are not good at describing their own nature. (How do fish describe water?) They also have incentives to say things that sound attractive rather than things that are true.

We’ve tried to assemble this guide to Stripe with both challenges in mind. This is our best attempt to share an honest description of our culture today. We hope you find it useful in deciding whether Stripe is the kind of place in which you’d like to spend your time.

We haven’t won yet

People often worry that they’re joining Stripe, or any nascently successful startup, too late. Have all the large problems been solved? Are there still important decisions left to be made and things to be built?

The good news: it’s not too late. Many of the most important problems that Stripe will ever solve are yet to be solved. You will, within weeks of joining Stripe, work on problems that no one here has solved before. (And you’ll occasionally end up working on problems that no one anywhere has solved before.) There are a lot of avenues that lead to trajectory-altering impact.

The bad news: our success is far from being assured. Most companies that have ever gotten to Stripe’s stage have plateaued — or worse. We consider lots of things to be “broken” today — and the more successful we are, the faster things will come to break in the future. (If you’ve ever played a tower defense game… scaling a fast-growing startup feels a lot like that.)

Questions you should ask yourself The value of Stripe (and your equity) is no foregone conclusion. While you’ll have a hand in the outcome, are you okay with a substantial amount of risk and ambiguity?

Move with urgency and focus

Our users entrust us with their money, their businesses, and their livelihoods. Millions of businesses around the world (individuals, startups, and large enterprises) are open for business only if we are. When we mess up, miss a deadline, or slow down, it matters. We take that responsibility seriously.

Great Stripes bring intensity and discipline to their work. We don’t care about unnecessary face time and Stripes have a great deal of flexibility around when and where they work because they know best what is needed to get their jobs done. Many Stripes prosper here while ensuring that they have dinner with their families or friends almost every evening.

But working here will mean some late nights, some weekends, and (especially if you end up in a position of significant responsibility) paying attention to email even during off-hours. Depending on your role, you may end up in meetings with colleagues dialing in from San Francisco, Tokyo, and Paris. There is no way to schedule that meeting such that everyone attends it during traditional work hours. Our business is intertwined with the global economy, so while Stripes take holidays, Stripe does not.

You will also be surrounded by exceptionally motivated, driven people. They span a diverse range of life circumstances, values, and working styles. This has the advantage of ensuring that you’ll almost never be annoyed about that slacker in the next cubicle (and not just because we don’t have cubicles). But it can also be stressful: if you compare yourself to others, you will almost always see someone working harder, staying longer, or being more successful.

We’re not a very competitive culture in the sense that someone else does not need to lose for you to win. Your colleagues won’t work to undermine you as they might in a winner-takes-all environment. However, we are a very competitive culture in the sense that, if you set a high bar, you’ll probably inspire someone working with you to try to push it higher. Success at Stripe means seeking out the ski slopes that are just a bit too steep.

We’re moving quickly, changing regularly, and aren’t very prescriptive in most things. We expect a lot of autonomy from Stripes both in the work they do and in their own development. We believe in performance management and feedback, but we’re not rigid in terms of a career paths and box checking. That said, don’t confuse lack of top down direction with lack of interest from the top: high performers are recognized, enabled, and rewarded. There are “conventional” forms of recognition at Stripe, like equity refreshes and bonuses. However, we get most excited about giving high performing Stripes the room to work on the most interesting and high-impact problems.

Questions you should ask yourself Do you want to work hard at a place that could never be described as a cushy job? Are you comfortable with owning your own career outcomes, rather than having a clear progression of goals and milestones described to you by a single decisionmaker?

Think rigorously

We care about being right and it often takes reasoning from first principles to get there.

Many behaviors are blindly copied and repeated far beyond their useful lives. We make a habit of trying to tease out the best version of an opposing argument. When criticized, we try to seek the truth in the accusation rather than activating our defensive shields. We invite people who many of us disagree with to come speak at Stripe and we welcome views that don’t obviously mesh with our own.

Rigor doesn’t mean not-invented-here syndrome. We’re interested in the world around us and think that other companies, industries, and academic fields have much to teach us. We actively hunt in other fields for inspiration and ideas that challenge our assumptions and that we could learn from.

Thinking rigorously has many natural applications to our daily work. For example, we think the traditional way that candidates are interviewed in the technology industry is suboptimal. We’ve invested significant effort in fixing it, by introducing work-sample tests, dispensing with whiteboard programming, de-emphasizing credentials, and actively working to combat unconscious bias, among other changes. But that doesn’t mean we’re satisfied with our current process either. We suspect that there are a lot of significant improvements still to be made.

Part of being rigorous is being judicious. Stripes have measured reactions to things. We engage in testing and strenuous discussions with colleagues — but we don’t yell.

Questions you should ask yourself When is the last time you changed your mind on a fundamental opinion you had? Do you do that frequently? Stripe deals with high variance situations on a day-to-day basis but are thoughtful and measured in response. Is that what you’re looking for?

Trust and amplify

By the standards of the rest of the world, we overtrust. We’re okay with that.

We treat each other with the same humility that we bring to our business. Many companies have a “no asshole” rule. We think that bar is far too low. We want to work in a company of deeply good people who treat their colleagues exceptionally well. No matter how talented, we won’t hire jerks.

There’s a delicate balance between rigor and trust. The most successful Stripes push the collective quality of thought and work to new limits. However, no matter how strong the disagreement, we believe firmly in the importance of trusting each other’s intentions.

Questions you should ask yourself Do you care a lot about having kind, warm, supportive colleagues? Are you willing to invest yourself in service of sustaining a high-trust environment?

Global optimization

Stripes do what’s best for the organization overall.

Because Stripe is highly interdependent, really good Stripes have a strong sense of overall ownership of the whole company but are non-territorial regarding their nominal domains. There are no bonus points for building large teams.

Not-my-job attitudes grate at Stripe: we admire, recognize, and reward people who do the opposite. Expect to routinely contribute to projects across the company. Expect to receive feedback from engaged coworkers who have less state about your projects than you do. You won’t always agree with feedback you get, but you should consider it seriously and with humility: it comes from a smart colleague who, like you, sincerely wants your project to succeed.

In the same way that we look for the best versions of ideas from other fields outside of Stripe, valuable contributions internally transcend team borders. A Stripe in Legal or User Ops can chime in on Product or Partnerships discussions, and an engineer may offer an opinion on a sales deal: we care about the quality of thought, not where it came from.

Questions you should ask yourself Stripe has very few titles, and we don’t share promotions publicly; after a few years your LinkedIn might not look as tricked-out as your peers at other companies. Will that bother you? Do you think of yourself as someone who will do whatever it takes to get the job done, even if that means doing a bunch of scut work?

The Stripe service

Through the tools that we build, we want to push the world to create better products and services.

We try to take a broad view of what our work adds up to and believe in taking seriously the full long-term consequences of what we create. We won’t just climb the profit gradient.

While we’re opinionated in determining what to build, we strive for neutrality in deciding who gets access to the results. That means you will not agree with the values or goals of every Stripe customer. If you voted in the last U.S. presidential election, we processed almost all donations for the other candidate: every major campaign in 2016 ran on Stripe. We think that it is a positive good to increase access to financial infrastructure, irrespective of the customer, so long as the business is operating within the laws of their jurisdiction. We have a variegated team and our values as a company are not simply the union of our values as individuals. Within our core principles, individuals with many different sets of values are welcomed.

Optimism

We are micro pessimists but macro optimists.

Internally, we’re always thinking about what’s broken, which problems could lie around the corner, and where the unaddressed risks lie. But an important aspect of Stripe culture is macro optimism. We believe that Stripe will be far better in the future than it is today. When considering ideas, we think “how might it work?” is more interesting than “why will it fail?”

We believe we’re yet to see most of the impact of the internet. And we think that ambitious, energetic, and deliberate efforts directed towards progress are surprisingly effective in improving the state of the world around us.

Wrap-up

Stripe processes hundreds of billions of dollars a year for millions of businesses around the world. Over 85% of Americans purchased something from a Stripe merchant in 2020. We handle more than 250 million API requests per day.

But we’ve set our sights higher: only a small fraction of the world’s commerce is mediated through the internet today. We seek not only to increase global participation in the online economy but also to rethink how that economy works. We need more Stripes to help us get there. We hope you’ll be one of them.

Feedback

In the spirit of thinking rigorously, we’d love your open and honest feedback on this guide. Let us know what you think

Your feedback has no impact on your application (there are no right or wrong answers!) and what you share with us won’t be reviewed by your recruiter or members of your interview panel.

Outline

Click on any section to jump to the relevant portion of the piece!

• The CEO as the cultural epicenter
• Dysfunction
• Stemming dysfunction
• The Cultural Paradox: I can’t change the culture because that’s not part of our culture‍
• Steering change‍
• Managing culture

The biggest investment a company can make is in its culture. Culture is what connects business goals, values, and people.

Since our founding, Asana has been committed to cultivating our culture in many ways, from hiring great people who embody our values to supporting those people in the best ways we can.

Hiring

Hiring is the first step to building a lasting culture that will support the growth of your business—in both good and bad times. We’ve invested in hiring practices that encourage us to get to know the whole person, allow candidates to show their strengths, and find candidates who bring a diversity of perspectives to our team.

Support

Culture doesn’t end with hiring—your team needs support. By investing in robust onboarding programs, emphasizing both professional and personal growth, and focusing our culture on mentorship and learning, we support our employees by investing in them. Other additions, like generous benefits that focus on wellness and happiness—our culinary and yoga programs, team outings, and office environment—take us the extra mile in supporting our employees.

Practice

A set of values or mission statements painted on a wall (which we have, actually) isn’t enough to bring values and culture to life. Companies need to put their values into practice. At Asana, we enforce No Meeting Wednesdays, encourage productive, agenda-driven meetings, and share meeting notes across the company. By practicing what we preach, our teams feel better connected to the company’s values, mission, and the rest of the organization.

Communication

Culture is an ongoing conversation: it’s constantly changing and growing, just as a company is. Each employee brings their own individuality to your company, and talking about it is a great way to encourage everyone to contribute.

Having open channels of communication, like feedback boards, employee surveys, or maybe even an “Opportunities” project in Asana encourages everyone to take part in the conversation. We keep an “Asana Opportunities” project open for everyone to add ideas to, and regularly make culture—or some subset of it—a topic of discussion for leadership and planning meetings.

An evolving culture

Culture is everyone’s to build and, as your company grows, it will evolve. The evolution of our culture has involved the revision of our values—several times!—as well as our processes. We even created a new role within the company (Heart of Culture), to drive all of our cultural efforts and work closely with our new Head of People Ops in connecting our ops, people, and culture. We wouldn’t be set up for success without someone thinking about how to mindfully evolve and scale our culture 100% of the time.

An updated #CultureCode

The Asana culture not only exists within our walls and amongst our team members, but also in our industry and community. A few years ago, we were asked by SlideShare to join a new online-presentation campaign they were launching with companies like Asana, Netflix, and HubSpot, called #CultureCode.

It’s been a great way to share our take on culture with everyone from candidates to customers, and we encourage all companies to share their own #CultureCode decks. Today, we’re publishing a new deck that reflects the changes and growth here at Asana over the past two years. We hope you can check it out, and let us know if you have your own to share!

The GitLab team handbook is the central repository for how we run the company. Printed, it consists of over 7,000 pages of text. As part of our value of being transparent the handbook is open to the world, and we welcome feedback. Please make a merge request to suggest improvements or add clarifications. Please use issues to ask questions.

When you hear “Lebron James,” you think superstar athlete. But, how about high performing leader?

Rarely do people make the connection between James and big tech CEOs like Jeff Bezos and Brian Chesky. However, Fortune Magazine highlighted all of these men in their 2017’s World’s Greatest Leaders list.

The magazine realized that they shared a common trait: they invested in themselves first and foremost.

Consistent, high performance takes effort and focus.

Habits coach Brendon Burchard defines high-performance as, “[the ability to succeed] above and beyond standard norms over the long-term.”

High performing leaders achieve great success in even extraordinary circumstances. They master their mind, emotions, and time to get the best out of themselves and their team.

Former Olympic and NBA championship teammate Richard Jefferson told ESPN about Lebron James’s growth mindset:

“He never wants to feel comfortable; he always wants to feel uncomfortable. And I think that’s what pushes him, that’s part of the reason why he’s so great is that he’s never in a mode like, ‘OK, this is a good place to be.’ He’s, you know, ‘OK, where can I go next? Where can I go next? I have to keep pushing and striving for another level of greatness.’ Because he knows that that’s [the] only way to achieve what he wants to achieve.”

James seeks constant improvement.

According to legendary tennis coach Bob Brett, one trait separates average players from sports champions.

In an interview with [Rotman Magazine,](http://www.tpacanada.com/sites/default/files/Coaching High Performance_0.pdf) Brett claims that high performing leaders like James are pushing themselves beyond expectations to strengthen their skills.

Interestingly, Brett noticed the same dedication in business executives:

“In life, you’re going to hit a lot of walls. When the best performers hit a wall, they see it as an opportunity to learn and grow. In business, on the long and complicated road up, if you aren’t a learner, you won’t get very far.”

But unlike athletes, senior leaders don’t have off-seasons. You’re expected to perform at your best 8+ hours a day, 5-7 days a week, for decades.

This pressure can be exhausting. However, if you adopt the effective coping and growth strategies from elite athletes, you can better maintain and improve your work to become a high performing leader, too.

Avoid the Burnout Epidemic

“Employee burnout has reached epidemic proportions,” said Charlie DeWitt, the VP of business development at Kronos. Last year, Kronos’s survey claimed that almost half of HR managers blame burnout for a good portion of their annual workforce turnover.The American Psychological Association (APA) revealed that job stress cost U.S. businesses about $300 billion per year, “through absenteeism, diminished productivity, employee turnover and direct medical, legal and insurance fees.”This is why the World Health Organisation (WHO) has called work burnout as the _“health epidemic of the 21st century.”_Sadly, managers and leaders are the ones most likely to suffer burnout. The article, “When Executives Burnout,” explains that managers and CEOs have a lot of important, but stressful duties contributing to it:

• Establish goals and prioritizes
• Accept and deflect hostility
• Resolve employee conflicts
• Tolerate insensitive personalities
• Improve brand reputation

A CEO of an electric company confessed his frustrations after a scandal put him in the center of many challenges:

“In my present role, I’m the guy who catches it all. I can’t seem to get people to stand still and listen, and I can’t continue to take all the hostility that goes with it—the crank calls, being woken up late at night and called names. I don’t know how much longer I can last in this job.”

Examples like this are why leadership roles are often called, “the loneliest in the business.”

Leaders need a break.

When leaders can’t handle stress, they tend to lash out at their employees. These negative attitudes kill their chances of becoming high performing leaders, and creates a cycle of reactive management.

This graph shows a positive correlation between employee engagement and supervisor effectiveness.

As you can see, low employee satisfaction, engagement, and commitment are directly correlated to having a poor manager. Meanwhile, great leaders appear to lead happier, more engaged employees.

How can these exhausted managers change for the better? Like their workers, they’re victims of intense demands.

The solution then is transforming how managers prioritize their well-being.

Get in The Zone

Most managers don’t see themselves as athletes, but you should.

In the article, “The Making of a Corporate Athlete,” performance experts Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz argue that executives have the same (if not, higher) work demands as athletes. Both desire to maintain high-performance in extreme and changing circumstances.

However, only one group seeks to maintain and increase its ideal performance state (IPS).

“a state in which an athlete performs to the best of his or her ability. It is a magical and…special place where performance is exceptional and consistent, automatic and flowing. An athlete [can] ignore all the pressures and let his or her body deliver the performance that has been learned so well. Competition is fun and exciting.”

The study surveyed 59 athletes from a variety of sports and concluded that they all performed best when they were in IPS or “the zone.” They felt confident, focused, and relaxed even during intense pressure.

If they can reach IPS, high performing leaders can also work at their best.

However, most managers will never achieve such a state as they fail to properly care for their well-being.

In “The Making of a Corporate Athlete,” Loehr and Schwartz state that high performing leaders take care of their body, emotions, mind, and spirit. Starting with yourself is essential to your success.

For example, former teammate Mike Miller revealed that Lebron James treats his health as an investment:

“He puts a lot of money behind taking care of his body. A lot of people think it’s a big expense, but that big expense has allowed him to make a lot more money for a long period.”

James reportedly gets massages, takes ice baths, and receive electro-stimulation. He knows that he can only perform at the level his body allows, so he makes sure that it’s in the best shape.

However, this is only part of his competitive edge. He told reporters at TD Garden that he prepares mentally for games:

“I put a lot of work into the physical side and take care of my body, but it is all mental to me. I understand exactly what is going on in the course of a game from both teams. That means understanding what we want to do and they want to do and things of that nature. It’s 90 percent mental for me.”

Lebron’s performance rituals help him become a better leader. When he takes care of himself, he gets into ISP faster.

LeBron is in good company.

Many other athletes similarly make major investments in their health and well being. For example, James Harrison is almost 40 but he has continued to perform well in after returning from retirement. A rarity in sports.

Even the younger players on his team struggle to keep up with his legendary Instagram workouts.

How did this “old man” overshadow his younger teammates? By spending over $350,000 per year on “body work.”

• An acupuncturist
• A dry-needling person
• A trainer
• A doctor
• A masseuse
• A physio-chiro masseur

Inspired by Tom Brady’s desire to play well into his 40s, fellow NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers adopted Brady’s diet plan, so he could also play football in his 40s.

He told ESPN that he dropped dairy for a more vegan-like diet and he limits his meat intake. He also prioritizes recovery by scheduling eight hours of sleep a night. Rodgers told SI that, “Nutrition and flexibility are things that will keep me playing at a high level into my 40s.“

Stable leaders have teams that perform better

Like Harrison and Rodgers, high performing leaders invest in improving their overall welfare. Because when you’re happier, you perform better.

When managers are happier, they tend to treat their employees better, increasing the likelihood of project success.

In “Manager emotional intelligence and project success: The mediating role of job satisfaction and trust,” researchers tried to determine the effects of manager attitudes on complex projects.

They hypothesized that managers with high emotional intelligence would increase work trust and job satisfaction, causing employees to complete assignments better. The researchers examined leadership and project effectiveness of an Australian defense organization with a $5 billion budget. The leaders’ goals were to complete a highly technical and complex project over a decade.

After the experiment, researchers concluded that emotional intelligence had a positive and significant relationship to job satisfaction, work trust, and project outcomes.

Find your CHE.

In another study, researchers interviewed over 740 leaders to find out how emotions and mental states impact their effectiveness and performance. Nearly 94% of respondents reported that Calm, Happy and Energized (CHE) are the three emotions that drive high-performance.

When high performing leaders take care of their mental state, they build better relationships with their employees. Due to this, their teams tend to have better communication, a connected purpose, and are more likely to solve problems.

How you can better deal with stress

You can prevent burnout by rethinking how you approach stress. High performing leaders understand that their work isn’t getting easier. Many of their biggest challenges will even be out of their control.

However, you can change how you react to stressful situations. You can train yourself to manage your reactions to them. Because contrary to popular belief, stress is good for you.

Berkeley researchers discovered that acute stress helps animals adapt to new situations. In their study on rats, they found that stressful events caused stem cells to rapidly reproduce into better cells, improving the rats’ mental performance.

So when rats faced similar stressful situations again, they could handle them better.

The [same process happens in muscle growth.](http://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article folder/musclesgrowLK.html) When muscles undergo trauma or damage, satellite cells work to repair the injured tissue. The cells multiply and fuse into muscle fibers to create new protein stands to improve damaged cords. Thus, making the muscle thicker and stronger.

Elite athletes know this. That’s why they seek challenges to build muscle and increase performance. You can do the same at work by training yourself to better handle stress and care for yourself.

Rest to better manage stress

While a healthy amount of stress makes you stronger, you can have too much. Too much stress creates many problems that will always catch up with you eventually.

One of the worst of all problems, burnout, is due to chronic stress or learned helplessness. When managers suffer from anxiety or lack of purpose, their performance and mood tend to decline.

In “The Making of a Corporate Athlete,” Loehr and Schwartz recommend that aspiring high performing leaders should practice something called, “stress oscillation.”

Stress oscillation is when a period of rest follows intense, stressful activity.

Learn to rest

Jim Connor, the former president and CEO of FootJoy, had trouble balancing his work and personal life. He consulted Loehr and Schwartz on getting him out of a deep rut:

“My feelings were muted so I could deal with the emotional pain of life. I had smoothed out all the [change] in my life to such an extent that oscillation [wasn’t allowed]. I was not feeling life but repetitively performing it.”

Connor was the first to arrive and the last to leave his office every day. However, this had no positive impact on his work performance. It only made him more upset.

After working with Loehr and Schwartz, Connor decided to work at an office location closer to his home a few days a week.

He spent most days at his main office performing at his best, but used his days at the second location to recover. He also leaves early from the second location to spend more time with his family.

This new routine boosted his morale and cut his commute by 90 minutes.

Time is just the beginning

Connor also added other healthy habits to increase his productivity:

“What a difference these fruit and water breaks make. I set my alarm watch for 90 minutes to prevent relapses, but I’m instinctively incorporating this routine into my life and love it. I’m far more productive as a result, and the quality of my thought process is measurably improved. Also, I’m doing more on big things at work and not getting bogged down in detail. I’m pausing more to think and to take time out.”

Connor is an example of how stress managing habits can improve your overall life, increasing your performance.

How Korean athletes handle stress

In “Coping Strategies Used by Korean National Athletes,” researchers surveyed 180 Korean athletes from a variety of sports about their past and current stress coping strategies.They discovered that they practiced one or more of the following:

1. Psychological training
2. Competitive training
3. Somatic relaxation
4. Hobby activities
5. Social support

All are strategies that business managers and leaders like you can adopt. All of these would help address the growing problem of depression within the tech industry.

Let’s take a look at these tactics:

1. Psychological training

With Psychological training, athletes try to, “control their mind, thoughts, and emotional state.” They practice visualizing their future performances and possible wins.

Researcher Angie LeVan claims that visualization, “enhance motivation, increase confidence and self-efficacy, improve motor performance.” It primes your brain for success.

Olympic Champion Ski Racer [Lindsey Vonn](https://books.google.com/books?id=8iu5CwAAQBAJ&pg=PA177&lpg=PA177&dq=if+you+want+to+be+a+champion,+you+will+have+to+win+every+race+in+your+mind+100+times+before+you+win+it+in+real+life+that+last+time.&source=bl&ots=RAvNojH9SM&sig=UVYAfBs56ykp7uAS4o9WYLAeISY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiNsN66u7vZAhUM34MKHbkiAWoQ6AEIngEwDQ#v=onepage&q=if you want to be a champion%2C you will have to win every race in your mind 100 times before you win it in real life that last time.&f=false) uses visualization before she starts a race:

“By the time I get to the start gate, I’ve run that race 100 times already in my head, picturing how I’ll take the turns. …I have always believed, if you want to be a champion, you will have to win every race in your mind 100 times before you win it in real life that last time.”

Similar to visualization, other athletes try meditation to find inner peace and increase focus. In a similar vein, another tactic is positive self-talk. Athletes try to prevent negative attitudes by reminding themselves of their talent and progress. As a result, they become more self-confident.

While it may sound odd at first, there’s every reason to try these at work. Try visualizing yourself crushing your next big presentation, or giving yourself positive reinforcement before a key task.

2. Competitive training

Competitive traning is when athletes focus most of their time and effort practicing. They watch videos of themselves and opponents to identify their strengths and weaknesses. For example, a Korean badminton player believes that this strategy gives him confidence:

“When my confidence was lost, even though my physical condition was ok, [I knew] the slump was coming. As a coping strategy, I worked harder and practiced harder than usual. I tried to escape from the slump by having the positive thoughts about how I practiced harder than before.”

Studying how others develop software, market, or sell like you do, is a great way to improve yourself to become a high performing leader.

3. Somatic relaxation

Here, athletes try to relax their bodies. They get messages, stretch their sore muscles, and get extra hours of sleep. Lebron James and James Harrison are major believers in this approach as we discussed earlier.

The CEO of Moz, Rand Fishkin, told CNN that strategies like this aren’t promoted enough in Silicon Valley:

“Sleep is not cool, pregnancy, not cool. All these things that normal human beings do and need — people need families, they need to go to sleep at night, but somehow that is excluded from the acceptable portion of the culture.”

Fishkin believes that these attitudes are leading to fewer high performing leaders. It’s why he’s invested more in himself, and encourages others to do the same.

3. Hobbies

Some athletes believe that having a fun time decreases their anxiety. They listen to music, watch movies, and read books to feel more at ease.On his blog, SumoMe founder Noah Kagan was honest about his episodes with exhaustion. He offered tips on how others could temporarily avoid depression. Many of them were hobbies and social outings that can decrease anxiety like dancing, going for a walk, and going to the gym.

Similarly, Buffer founder Joel Gascoigne has been an advocate for the power of a daily walk:

“A good friend introduced me to [The Power of Full Engagement], and also helped me craft a new ritual to help me get to sleep at a good hour and in a good state of mind each night…I’ve adjusted this ritual over time, and it can be simplified to two important parts: Disengage: An activity to allow total disengagement from the day’s work. For me, this is going for a 20 minute walk every evening at 9:30pm. This is a wind down period, and allows me to evaluate the day’s work, think about the greater challenges, gradually stop thinking about work and reach a state of tiredness. Avoid re-engaging: After the activity, go straight to bed. Be sure that all devices are in a separate room to the one you sleep (and silent). Once in bed, do not read books which are related to your work in any way. For me, this means reading fiction.”

Sometimes, less is more. Taking a few minutes out of your day to properly wind down and turn your mind off work can help you do better work the next day.

5. Social support

You’re not alone and do not have to feel like you’re working without support. Many of the Korean athletes in the study relied on the “technical, emotional, and informational support from family, friends, and coaches.” Years ago, TINT CEO Tim Sae Koo published an article detailing his burnout in Silicon Valley.

To overcome his depression, he spends time with fellow founders and CEOs to feel less lonely. Also, each year, he takes a vacation with the founders at Buffer to secluded islands to relax his mind.

Whether you seek support from friends and family, or others in your industry in similar roles, social support can go a long way.

6. Prayer

Spiritual intervention has helped athletes going through a personal crisis or who have pre-game jitters. A table tennis gold medalist explains:

“I always prepared my game with prayer from the major games to the minor games. The content of my prayer to God is to help me do my best in practice time. I committed all things to God…These prayers make me feel calmer and more secure. I forget the fear of losing. It results in good play.”

You can pray to your God whenever you’re uncertain about your upcoming performance.

Conclusion

Executive managers and leaders are in a tight spot. You‘re expected to perform at your best in extreme circumstances. And, the pressure only increases.

If you want to do better, you must be better.

Improving significant aspects of your life—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—will make you happier, increasing your work performance and ability to lead others.

When you adopt stress-managing techniques from elite athletes, you’ll learn how to overcome challenges at a faster rate. You‘ll also learn how to manage your energy better to lead a more productive and healthier workplace.

Only once you are driven, healthy, and happy, can you then truly turn your focus outward to better leading your employees.

If you want to improve your team and organization, start by improving yourself.

Want help building the right habits to lead your team well? Want a little help to be more organized, prepared, and thoughtful? Then join other high performing leaders and [sign up for a free trial of Lighthouse here](https://getlighthouse.com/?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=blog post&utm_campaign=high performing leaders&utm_term=free trial&utm_content=end of post).

Outline

Click on any section to jump to the relevant portion of the piece!

• [THE ELEMENTS OF MOTIVATION](https://firstround.com/review/the-simple-tool-that-revives-employee-motivation/#text_96dd89a3518b4e569b472b45f29cd4ca:~:text=THE ELEMENTS OF MOTIVATION,(or more) of these four elements%3A)
• [HOW TO SPOT FLAGGING MOTIVATION](https://firstround.com/review/the-simple-tool-that-revives-employee-motivation/#text_0fc3a7b773d84a9b8f1acd1915235662:~:text=HOW TO SPOT FLAGGING MOTIVATION,it through one of two channels%3A)
• [TURNING THINGS AROUND](https://firstround.com/review/the-simple-tool-that-revives-employee-motivation/#text_8d60695e3ac74a17a8ff764069464148:~:text=hear.”-,TURNING THINGS AROUND,1. Engineering feels like it works for Product)
• [BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER](https://firstround.com/review/the-simple-tool-that-revives-employee-motivation/#text_ad5f63025422488eb73e9c96ae2a29bb:~:text=BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER,as well as how to right)