CHAPTER 8

Nourishing Your Cell

Putting It All Together

Our philosophy is that we care about people first.

—Mark Zuckerberg

Remember back in high school when your science teacher explained how cells are made of molecules, and how they are made of atoms? We all got the lesson at one point or another: life is complex and relies on systems within systems to function. You need the right kind of atoms and the right kind of molecules to make up a healthy cell.

Each system has its characteristics, its governing laws, and its functions—all the while fitting within the larger framework it occupies. You can choose to look at this as separate systems working within their confines or as separate systems working together. I prefer to view them as interdependent. And you should, too (Figure 8.1).

This multisystem hierarchy is an analogy for the different pieces that make up every business. Replace the cell with the organization, the molecules with the teams, and the atoms with the individuals. For the cell to be complete and healthy, it has to have the necessary molecules and atoms, which also have to be sound in their own right. In the same manner, you keep your business whole by ensuring that your teams are successful and you guarantee that your teams are successful by making sure that each individual is high performing. It’s a straightforward concept, and yet so many people struggle to determine that each rung of the hierarchy is functioning at its best (Figure 8.2).

Figure 8.1 Atoms, molecules, and cells

Figure 8.2 Organizations and cells

The core of this chapter is the collective implementation of all five of the strategies I’ve defined. I find this biological framework a metaphor for understanding how the strategies must be integrated and executed not just with senior executives, but at every level of your organization.

Putting all of these strategies together is as much a question of who as it is a question of how. Atoms must have the right kind of charge, molecules must be properly bonded, and cells must have functioning organelles. Similarly, individuals must be high performing and clear headed, teams must be collaborative and communicative, and an organization must be continually strategizing and looking toward the future. And, just like in biology, for one rung of the hierarchy to be successfully functioning, the one below it must be as well. An organization is as good as its teams and a team is only as capable as the participating members, including its leaders.

Deciding to see your business through these three different groupings allows you to create significant change. This bottom–up perspective will reinforce the values of my five strategies on a granular level. Your goal here should be to weave the philosophies that underpin these strategies into the fabric of your culture. You want it to be the air people breathe.

Using this framework to view the system is ultimately how these five strategies become sustainable. Some businesses—like Compaq—begin with these values. Others have to feed them retroactively into the culture of their organization.

If you find your organization falls into the second category, I want to emphasize that implementing these systemic changes is a process, so it’s important not to get too focused on immediate results. In many cases, you’re asking your workforce to reconfigure schemas of how to behave and do their job. That’s not something to take lightly.

Consider the Kübler–Ross change curve as a way to map this internal disruption.¹ As you strategize with individuals, teams, and your organization as a whole, you should pay careful attention to how workers are experiencing the change. Where in the process of integration are people getting stuck? This question will be essential for dealing with the mental roadblocks that you, your team, or your workers will face (Figure 8.3).

I’d urge you to take this a step further and explicitly introduce the change curve as part of implementing the strategies. If you can make conscious the process of accepting what is new and foreign, you will see your organization accelerate even more. You, your team, and your workers should be learning how to learn.

Figure 8.3 Kübler–Ross change curve

A useful starting point for helping those going through the change is to first explore what it might look like to operate differently. Often we’ve worked similarly in the past, but not with the required discipline or consistency. Try to nudge particular processes into place until they become routine.

Each level of your cell will need to be taken care of and managed in different ways. Just like a cell relies on molecules to exist, so do molecules rely on atoms. But the three groupings don’t all have the same needs. The makeup and functionality of a cell are radically different than the makeup of a molecule or atom.

By the same logic, an organization has different qualities than a team, and a team has different characteristics from an individual. Here’s a more explicit outline of how to support each level.

You may be asking yourself how this all differ from the last chapter on levitating. While operating at the meta level is similar, there’s a difference. Nourishing your cell means getting into a rhythm, so these strategies become habitual. It means internalizing what success looks like for your organization and having a workforce that knows how their jobs tie back to the vision of your business.

Levitating allows you and your team to survey the big picture—but that’s still an intentional exercise. This chapter is about taking all of my strategies, which address both the macro and micro, and ingraining them in your organization’s subconscious.

But I don’t want this to turn into every other business book and begin prescribing all these arbitrary parameters. There is no formula for getting all of this exactly right. Every business has different circumstances. My approach has always been to use what works for your company as long as you schedule meetings in advance and people are prepared to discuss what’s important.

I’ll also add that explicit and meaningful communication goes a long way. It’s hard enough to convey old ideas, never mind new ones. Just because you commented, sent out a memo, or gave a PowerPoint presentation does not mean that you’ve successfully communicated.

And it doesn’t just come down to repetition. Those who are receiving your message will need to understand it in the way that’s most useful to them. No matter what role he or she plays, every worker with whom you’re communicating will approach the discussion with the same question, “What does this mean for me?” It will be your job to answer this honestly. Some will need to understand the logic behind the information, while others will need to know the emotion behind it. Some will be looking for the big picture interpretation. Others will need a detailed play-by-play explanation. Every worker should be able to walk away knowing exactly how this new information is going to affect him or her.

Sometimes, communication is just a forgotten first step. I had a client once who was running into a lot of difficulty with a merger and needed help getting started on the transition. The management came to me for advice on a rollout plan. I told them before you focus on the merger itself, you need a communications plan. How else is everyone going to know what’s happening and why? Or, more importantly, what does it mean to your employees and what do they need to do to ensure success?

Last, but not the least, I also recommend a quarterly off-site retreat for you and your senior team. All of my most successful clients have made this nonnegotiable protocol. Other than that, here are some general techniques I’ve seen work wonders with businesses trying to implement my strategies collectively.

The Cell

It’s a good idea for you or your team to find a mentor, someone who knows what success looks like in your space, especially given the resources with which you have to work.

Some companies hire consultants, some have informal advisers, and others have official advisory boards. The benefit to having a third party like this in the room comes from the objective party’s ability to keep people in check and accountable. A third party also has the opportunity to model behavior and strategy—some people even shadow you on the job. There’s real value in having someone in the room watch your performance and draw a comparison to your potential.

When I attend meetings, it’s often as a facilitator to help drive productivity and constructive dialogue. We get super broad and super specific: we cover everything from high-level strategy to extremely minute issues. When people isolate conversation to one department, I always bring it back to cross-functionality. I want the understanding of the group to be focused, yet holistic.

I also have frequent correspondence with the senior team, offering feedback and doing check-ins. I’m less a referee and more of a coach. While my presence allows the team to explore new ideas safely and intelligently, the eventual hope is that the senior team learns these skills themselves. As a consultant, I measure success by my ability to walk away and see the organization continuing with their high-performing behavior without needing my help.

The Molecules

If this already reflects how your organization’s senior executives operate, you should take a look at how you treat your teams. One technique I’ve seen work with past clients has been to initiate talent reviews.

You bring in the central teams that make up your organization and take a look at their performance. Are the team members all functioning at their highest potential? Is anything dumbing down the team’s success? The structure of these evaluations can vary quite a bit.

One tactic is to bring awareness to individual strengths and weaknesses to better diagnose what the team needs. There may be untapped potential from a specific employee that could accelerate a team’s success if only he received the right attention. The same can apply to someone who’s impeding progress. As you’re about to see, this kind of granule evaluation can come in handy.

The Atoms

Talent reviews are a fantastic tool for evaluating individual workers. An explicit structure for this kind of process is a great way to define what your goals, expectations, and concerns are with your employees. Reviews let them know exactly into what they should be investing the most time, energy, and thought.

Here are a few great questions every worker should be able to answer in the process.

If a worker has specific areas he or she needs to improve, an organized process for the evaluation should help identify specific strategies to grow. Every individual should walk away feeling supported.

I think it’s most fruitful to give your staff as much feedback as you can. And the more immediate, the better. If you follow up with informal feedback daily or weekly, your employees will more likely develop habits aligned with your expectations. Add onto that a quarterly meeting to ensure everyone is still working toward their goals, and you should begin to see results. A more formal talent review can be scheduled once or twice a year.

Finally, give each worker the opportunity to have his or her voice heard. Ask for feedback on your behavior. What are you doing that’s working or isn’t working? Is there anything about which your employees routinely complain? What are you doing right that you should be increasing?

Next, ask workers what their plans are, and how your organization might be able to help them. Remember, your organization is only as good as the sum of its parts. Caring for your employees is a legitimate investment in your success. Your concern lets your workers know your organization is interested in them and their ability to grow, which will improve loyalty and decrease turnover. Caring about employees is valuable to any business that wants to retain its institutional knowledge, rather than wasting resources educating new workers on the same systems of operation.

Let’s take a look at a quintessential example: a company that started with a singular vision, but has since engineered success on a variety of fronts—both by dominating established industries and reinventing others. Not only is the company a household name, but it probably knows more about your home-life than you’d like: Facebook.

Love or hate them; this is a company that has benefited from nourishing its cell. On an organizational level, it has kept its gaze facing forward, setting the standard for a successful and monetizable social network. Acquiring potential competition like Instagram and WhatsApp, its reach continues to expand and bleed into neighboring markets. As of 2018, there are 2.1 billion users out of the 4 billion that have access to the Internet.²

In 2008, Mark Zuckerberg hired Sheryl Sandberg as the company’s COO. It was a smart move forward because of Sandberg’s ability to excel where Zuckerberg fell flat. One of her first projects was building Facebook’s desktop’s interface to better support the company’s potential as a highly personalized data-fueled ad platform. However, by 2012, the climbing number of mobile users had become a legitimate threat to their desktop-centered business model. It was an exemplary moment to react with agility, and within 3 years, the company had successfully integrated mobile ads into the Facebook app.³

But the real takeaway here comes from the company’s numbers. In 2015, Facebook made nearly eight times as much from mobile ads as Twitter and is projected to make almost 15 times as much in 2018.⁴ On one hand, we should account for Facebook’s sheer reach compared with Twitter’s (there are approximately six Facebook users for every one Twitter user).⁵,⁶ But on the other hand, it’s worth noting the differences in management between the two companies. Around that same time in 2015, Twitter was consistently dealing with turnover of their top-level executives, a struggle that has continued until today (Figure 8.4).⁷

Figure 8.4 Mobile Ad revenues of Facebook and Twitter

This difference in stable leadership may not be the root of the two companies’ varying success, but I can’t imagine how productivity can soar in an environment where bosses are moving through a revolving door every year. Not only does stable leadership ensure less wasted time to relearn the same protocol, but it also creates insulation. It allows the organization’s culture to begin operating with cohesion and systemically embody a singular vision.

What’s more, Zuckerberg nourishes his teams and the individuals that comprise them. Out of all the top Silicon Valley tech giants, Facebook has the highest employee retention rate.⁸ Not to mention the fact that the company has been rated several times as the best place to work in the United States.⁹

Zuckerberg is not only driving his company to greater heights, but by nourishing the cell, he’s also taking care of his molecules and atoms. Caitlin Kalinowski, Facebook’s product design engineering director, summed it up nicely when explaining to Business Insider how the company hired her.

Mark Zuckerberg ended up calling me, which was unexpected. I think that’s one of the things that’s impressive about him in particular. I feel like he reaches down deep into his organizations—in recruiting, but also in getting to know people.¹⁰

Now picture your business. Hold it up to Facebook and see how it compares. Are there any glaringly obvious faults? Or do you feel like you’re embodying most or all of these strategies? I’m sure you can answer for you and your senior team, but what would lower level staff say? How about those entry-level workers that have just come on board? If you had to grade how managers nourish each level of your organization, what grades would you give out?

To take some of the stress out of this, I’ve put together a template that can help with compartmentalizing some of the primary variables.

This template is by no means exhaustive, but it’s a great place to start. Take a look (Figure 8.5).

Figure 8.5 Template of five no-nonsense strategies

¹“Understanding the Kubler–Ross Change Curve,” Cleverism, March 12, 2016.

²S. Kemp. January 30, 2018. “Digital in 2018: World’s Internet Users Pass the 4 Billion Mark,” We are Social.

³“The new face of Facebook: How to win friends and influence people,” The Economist, April 9, 2016.

⁴“Mobile internet advertising revenues of major ad-selling companies worldwide from 2015 to 2018 (in billion U.S. dollars),” eMarketer, October, 2016.

⁵“Number of monthly active Twitter users worldwide from 1st quarter 2010 to 4th quarter 2017 (in millions),” Statista, 2018.

⁶“Number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide as of 4th quarter 2017 (in millions),” Statista, 2018.

⁷J. Dunn. September 28, 2016. “Look at how many executives have left Twitter over the years,” Business Insider.

⁸B. Peterson, “Travis Kalanick lasted in his role for 6.5 years—five times longer than the average Uber employee,” Business Insider, August 20, 2017.

⁹R. Gillett. December 7, 2017. “7 reasons Facebook is the best place to work in America and no other company can compare,” Business Insider.

¹⁰A. Cain. December 7, 2017. “What it’s REALLY like to work at Facebook,” Business Insider.