Idea 1: Decide on, clearly articulate and share, and promote/maintain the org’s values
“Idea 2: Office hours with the CEO / Executive Director / President / whatever”
Why did Mochary recommend these two ideas? I can kinda guess why, and both seem to be good ideas. But I would want to know the context, and/or what makes you agree that they are good ideas.
Excerpts on deciding on, clearly articulating and sharing, and promoting/maintaining the org’s values
Chapter 17: Culture
Culture is the unspoken set of rules that people in a group follow when interacting with each other. You act differently when you’re in a bar than when you’re at a family dinner. That’s because the rules that run the interactions between the different nodes in the networks have changed. Culture is the name for those rules.
Values
By Alex MacCaw
Values are a critical element in your company’s culture, and your company will function at its most efficient if your employees understand and share them. Once your team has a referenceable shared set of values they can make decisions without you, and more importantly evaluate candidates for culture fit. As the team grows interactions between new hires and the core team, who defined the company values, diminishes. Having a set of established and referenceable values helps disseminate those values to new team members without daily interactions.
One misnomer [my note: should’ve been “misconception”; this activated my pedantry button] CEOs sometimes have is thinking they get to choose the values. By the time you’re 30 or so employees your company has a set of values whether you like it or not. It’s now your job to codify what’s already there. While it is possible to change a value, it will take a lot of work.
Agreeing on what your values are is the kind of statement that needs maximum buy-in, so it should involve your whole company. Send out a survey and gather contributions from everyone. Ask your team to suggest both a value and the name of an employee who exemplifies it. Then arrange all the suggestions into common themes and have your leadership team vote on the final cut.
Once you have agreed upon your values, use them to guide your hiring and firing. Bring in people who want to live by these principles and let go of people who don’t. Otherwise, your values will have no meaning.
Distribute your values, print them out and repeat them until your team knows them back-to-front. Every week at the all-hands highlight a value and a person who’s actions best exemplifies that value that week.
The following are an example of Clearbit’s values. They combine a short pithy statement (easily rememberable), with a longer description for clarity.
Care (Give a shit). Empathize with customers. Take the time to understand their frustrations, needs, and desires.
Craft (Master it). Own your craft. Never stop learning and improving.
Team (Work together). Teamwork makes the dream work. Fill gaps. There’s no such thing as “it’s not my job.”
Truth (Say it). Be upfront and candid. Say it like it is. Hold yourself and others accountable.
Initiative (Be resourceful). Don’t wait for permission. Figure it out — or figure out who can.
Fun (Have it). Don’t take yourself too seriously — life is short.
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[Regarding company meetings:] For another perspective, Peter Reinhardt of Segment shares: “We use all hands for sharing across teams of what teams are accomplishing, working on, celebrating wins (reinforce our values), and recognition broadly… plus bringing in customers to talk. I find this much healthier than an obsession with whatever leadership team is talking about (although we do present the board deck + board topics once per quarter.)”
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[One goal of quarterly offsites is to “Refresh Vision and Values”]
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Values
There are many ways to create your company values.
A simple one is to complete the following sentence: “The rest of you in the company can make all of the decisions from now on, as long as you ….” This is appropriate when the company is small and values are entirely aspirational.
Another version is to acknowledge the culture that you already have. To do this, each Leadership Team member should pick one person in the company who is NOT on the Leadership Team and exhibits a value that you wish would be a universal behavior. Name the person and the behavior. Then select 3-5 such examples. This method is best used when the company already has a sizeable team and existing culture.
I’ll put some relevant excerpts from the earlier, free ebook version in a pair of comments. (And if you’re wondering about any other specifics, you could also use the search feature in that.) Also note that I don’t necessarily agree that these are good ideas, or good ideas for all orgs—the “handful of concrete ideas” section is things I thought it may be worth doing, and that I should note down so I can think about them later.
Excerpts on office hours
This accountability, coaching and transparency needs to happen in both directions (from CEO to the company, and from the company to the CEO) at every level (company, department, team and individual).
This is best achieved through a regular series of meetings:
One-on-One
Team
Company-wide (All Hands)
Office hours
Company-wide social event
Quarterly planning offsite
Each manager should plan to devote a full day each week to internal meetings. The weekly team meeting will be the longest (up to three hours in the beginning, until teams learn the habit of writing down all input prior to the meeting, then it can get down to 30 minutes). The weekly one-on-one meetings and office hours will consume the remainder of the day. This timing determines how many team members a single manager can effectively oversee. If one of your managers can’t fit all the necessary meetings into a single day, she’s got too many people reporting directly to her, and you need to re-organize, or she needs to run more efficient meetings.
The overhead—twenty percent of the standard work week—can feel tremendous to a startup CEO who is accustomed to the organic information flow of a small group working together in the same room. But without this one-day-per-week investment, a larger team will never fully know what to do, nor will the CEO get the needed feedback on her performance or the company’s performance.
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On your day set aside for meetings, schedule One-On-One meetings prior to the team meeting. Schedule them back-to-back, and allot twenty-five to fifty minutes for each one. If there is a serious issue to discuss, such as serious job dissatisfaction, then use your Open Office Hour (see below) later that day to fully address the issue.
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Open Office Hour
Each manager should set aside one hour each week for an open office hour, during which anyone can come introduce an issue. This ensures that all employees feel that they can be heard, but limits the amount of time required to a predictable level for the manager.
Thanks for this!
Why did Mochary recommend these two ideas? I can kinda guess why, and both seem to be good ideas. But I would want to know the context, and/or what makes you agree that they are good ideas.
Excerpts on deciding on, clearly articulating and sharing, and promoting/maintaining the org’s values
I’ll put some relevant excerpts from the earlier, free ebook version in a pair of comments. (And if you’re wondering about any other specifics, you could also use the search feature in that.) Also note that I don’t necessarily agree that these are good ideas, or good ideas for all orgs—the “handful of concrete ideas” section is things I thought it may be worth doing, and that I should note down so I can think about them later.
Excerpts on office hours
thanks!