Return Path has a very distinct culture, and I'm not going to prescribe it as the culture you should build for your own company. Any number of cultures can lead to success. The essential point is to realize that every company has a culture, whether it's a deliberate enactment of the company's values or an accidental accretion of behaviors and vibes. Don't let the latter creep up on you. Whatever you do, be deliberate!
I always draw on great business books to become a better CEO, but it was in a book on evolutionary biology, Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins, that I found a rich metaphor that is applicable to business in many ways.
There are over 900 kinds of fig trees in the world. Who knew? I was dimly aware there was such a thing as a fig tree, although quite frankly I'm most familiar with the fig in its Newton format.
Some species reproduce wildly inefficiently—like wild grasses, whose pollen is spread through the air; with a lot of luck, one in a billion (with a “b”) lands in the right place at the right time and propagates. At the opposite end of the spectrum stands the fig tree. Not only do fig trees reproduce by relying on the collaboration of fig wasps to transport their pollen from one to the next, but there are over 900 different kinds of fig wasps—one per tree species. Only the right kind of fig wasp can successfully help pollinate a given fig tree (fig wasp 879 is a distinct species: somewhere between Acophila mikii and Wiebesia vidua.) The two have evolved together over thousands of millennia, and while we humans might take the uninformed view that a fig tree is a fig tree, fig wasps have clearly figured out how to differentiate one species from another, all in the name of propagation.
So what the heck does this have to do with business? Plenty, but I want to focus on the lessons about business culture first.
I assume that not only would most of us not be able to discern one tree or wasp type from another, but that we also wouldn't be able to discern any of the 900+ types of trees or wasps from thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of types of trees or bugs in general! Here's the thing: I know hundreds of Internet companies. I know dozens of email companies. And I can tell you within five minutes of walking around the place or meeting an executive which ones I'd be able to work for, and which ones I wouldn't. The older and bigger the company, the more distinct and deeply rooted its culture becomes. The lesson: cultivate your company's culture with same level of care and attention to detail that you would your family—regardless of your role or level in the company!
Return Path SVP of People Angela Baldonero on Saying No to Status Quo
Every startup lives or dies by its team. Products are important, but people come first. Below, Angela Baldonero, my long-time business partner as our Senior Vice President of People, talks about some of the things she believes define a great “people-first” company.
This is an exciting time to start a company, and it's an even more exciting time to build an incredible culture and workplace where people can create, connect, and contribute.
It's relatively easy to create a standard, if better-than-average, company, with fun perks and all the systems and programs that you're supposed to implement as you grow. As you hire more people in more locations and set them to work on increasingly complex problems, you will want to create some level of structure to maintain efficiency and avoid duplication of effort. In order to create something extraordinary, CEOs must resist the average, common-sense policies, systems, and procedures.
A new world of work is being born around us. In this new world, most traditional HR practices are ineffective and irrelevant. Instead, there are four key areas you should focus on:
As your company grows and scales, you have a critical choice to make. The temptation is to lock things down—to create guidelines that will ensure that bad decisions are averted. Don't get caught up in the “What if someone screws up or makes a bad decision?” discussion. Turn the conversation around and focus on your best people. What if everything you do is focused on your top performers? The people you trust? The people who make great decisions? The people who can think critically and creatively and can handle a bit of ambiguity?'
Set your people free to focus on important, high-impact work and solve challenging business problems. That's how companies will win now.
Angela Baldonero, SVP of People, Return Path
I opened this section by claiming that I wouldn't insist on one type of culture over another. You can be fig wasp 328, 236, or 812. Just choose the one that matches your tree.
It's time to qualify that statement somewhat. There are certain values that every company should have—just like every fig wasp has six legs and a pair of wings. If you want your company to be a world-class organization, there are two things you absolutely need: respect for your people and an environment of trust. You can succeed financially without those things to some degree, especially if your business is taking off due to market forces and timing. But why would you want to merely succeed when you could be great?
I strongly believe that work-life balance is critical. (For complementary viewpoints, see Danny Meyer's contribution to Part Five on self-management, and Startup Life by Brad Feld and Amy Batchelor.) I've worked in a grind-it-out 100-hour-per-week environment. Quite frankly, it sucks. One week I actually filled in 121 on my hourly time sheet as a consultant. If you've never calculated the denominator, it's only 168. Even being well paid as a first-year analyst out of college, the hourly rate was dreadful. Thinking about that 121 gives me the shivers today—and it certainly puts those 40, 50, 60, even 70-hour work weeks in perspective. All of those still let you have a life. An average week of 40 hours probably doesn't make sense for a high-growth company of relatively well-paid knowledge workers. At 121, you barely get to shower and sleep.
While you may get a lot done working like a dog, you don't get a lot more done hour for hour relative to productive people do in a 50-hour-per-week environment. Certainly not twice as much. People who say they thrive on that kind of pressure are simply lying—or, to be fair, not lying but rationalizing the amount of time they spend at work. Your productivity simply diminishes after some number of hours. As a CEO, even a hard-charging one, I think it's better to focus on creating a productive environment than an environment of sustained long hours.
Work has ebbs and flows just like life has ebbs and flows. As long as the work generally gets done well and when you need it, you have to assume that sometimes people will work long hours in bursts, and sometimes people will work fewer hours. Work-life balance is not measured in days or even weeks, but over the long term. To that end, I've always believed in “letting people be people” as a means of trading off freedom and flexibility for high levels of performance and accountability. At Return Path, we have always tried to create an environment where people can be people by:
The result of this philosophy is that we have an incredibly productive environment where people have fun, lead their lives, and still get their jobs done well and on time. The details of your own policies can vary, as long as they reflect an essential respect for your team members' lives.
Trust is the bedrock of relationships. Relationships are the bedrock of an organization. Anything you can do to foster trust strengthens your organization. At the end of the day, transparency, authenticity, and caring create an environment of trust.
What are some examples of that?
This needs to apply to all your managers, not just the CEO. Your job? Manage everyone to these standards.
Return Path Board Member and IronPort Systems Founder and CEO Scott Weiss on Being a Strong Yet Approachable Leader
Some CEOs run command-and-control startups with strict hierarchies and very little in the way of CEO sociability. Return Path isn't like that. I work hard to be approachable, but, as one leader put it, “the buck stops here.” Scott Weiss, founder and CEO of IronPort (acquired by Cisco in 2007) offers his advice about how CEOs can strike that balance.
The best leaders I know are not only smart and decisive; they create an environment where everyone feels comfortable challenging them. This is really hard because it is often assumed that the CEO is the smartest person in the room. However, if he acts that way, he'll never get the feedback necessary to make great decisions. So how does one balance being a strong and approachable leader? Here are a number of practical things that I've found helpful:
Scott Weiss, Return Path Board Member and IronPort Systems Founder and CEO
Management Moment
Admit Mistakes
At a presidential debate with John Kerry in 2004, George W. Bush stunned viewers by refusing to admit that he had ever made any big mistakes in life other than trading Sammy Sosa when he owned the Texas Rangers. This was well after it had been settled that the decision to go to war with Iraq was based on faulty intelligence information about the imminent danger posed by weapons of mass destruction!
Today's highly polarized political environment discourages politicians from admitting mistakes, and it will take an exceptionally courageous leader to do so. Publicly admitting a mistake as CEO, along with a careful distillation of lessons learned, can go a long way toward strengthening the bond between leader and team, regardless of the size of the company. It encourages risk taking and learning, two skills you want everyone in your organization to have.
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