Get Together
This weekend we had our annual team get together. I wanted to share why it matters so much to me.
I know these things are often seen as being a bit naff, and it’s a lot to ask full-time workers to give up a weekend to spend time with people they don’t much like, but I really think it’s vital for any mission-led organisation.
Maybe I’m selfish, but it’s so awesome to spend time with this group of people. Part of what makes it so awesome is that each of our local teams are like local superstars. It’s like hanging out with some of the most influential ecosystem actors and getting to learn what’s really happening across the country.
For this get together we had 28 people come together from across the UK, and we all descended on Cardiff. We spent the day in Techniquest and everyone had a slot to share what’s working across the business.
In seven packed hours we covered a lot, but the joy came from spotting the patterns and trends, and working together on the opportunities for the next couple of years.
I thought I’d share a bit about why I think these types of gatherings are essential.
Newsletters
Sending information by email is fine, and more recently I’ve started recording our internal all-team memos like a news package which increases engagement but it doesn’t do what meeting in-person does. It’s one of the reasons why I don’t think 100% remote works.
Some of this information has to land - it doesn’t work if you just put it in peoples’ inboxes and both hope they read it and hope it sinks in.
Meeting in person enables you to have a much more interactive discussion rather than trying to work out how to put it in an email.
Strategic ideas are complex and counter-intuitive, you can’t always capture the full context with the same power as face-to-face.
You can make a statement and look into people’s eyes to see what the reaction is. If you’re still not sure you can ask if that really landed, you can ask things more provocatively and more conceptually to create the space for things to move into in the future.
It also means you can share ambiguous news that might otherwise be taken as being good or bad depending on how you react. We can immediately take views and gauge reactions - more on that later.
It is useful to share why we are making decisions before sharing those decisions, and some of these things need time to settle.
Change unsettles, and too much change too often can lead to confusion as well as the lack of a solid foundation.
As the company has grown we’ve had to be a bit more strategic with how we do change without causing this disruption, and while it might slow down the innovation process it prevents that innovation going to waste.
Sharing’s Caring
There’s something more powerful about delivering in person that just can’t be achieved online.
It’s useful to be able to share things and know that you give everything the best chance to land.
We’re a business that has grown fast in the last six years, and anyone who has been involved with fast growing companies will know that it can be a very painful process. And that’s not to mention that in these six years we’ve (so far) had Brexit, Covid, and the cost of living crisis, and that only scratches the surface.
We’re also a business that relies on having amazing people who are empowered to create value for their communities.
We do a thorough induction process, and we do weekly and monthly check-ins. We encourage peer-to-peer engagement and we have Slack for everything in between.
But some things, like opinions and ideas, develop over the course of months and years rather than day-to-day.
We don’t necessarily know when these ideas sneak up on us, but then all of a sudden there they are, and they seem as clear as day.
Reflecting on the past year gives us a chance to go back over the days and weeks that have come and gone, and see how the picture has changed.
We have a section on things that haven’t gone so well, but it isn’t one of those “tell me about your weaknesses” “well sometimes I work too hard” style questions.
It’s about having people share issues with peers to come up with ideas for how to overcome them, and because everyone is doing it there should be more confidence that those issues will be shared with empathy and understanding rather than blame or any traditional sense of failure.
The other value in sharing these issues is that it humanises other peers who might look flawless or like it is effortless to them. In our world there are honestly never two days alike, and there are certainly never two Community Managers alike.
By sharing what went well we get ideas, but by sharing what went wrong we get a toolkit to overcome issues in the future, and the mindset required to make it work.
Flat Hierarchy
I know flat hierarchies are a bit of a cliche, but the lack of politics this weekend was a joy. Going back to that point at the top about these things being weekends spent with people who you don’t like - I don’t think that’s true in our case.
I think fostering a peer-to-peer environment has built a level of mutual respect and admiration across teams that has stacks of value, and which means that there’s an appreciation for what they do.
By spending such a big portion of the day sharing what went well and what didn’t in the last year we create humility. The vulnerability in this creates an opportunity to ask for help, and their wins don’t feel threatening but feel like shared success.
That’s a vital part of our model: we don’t want to cookie cut what works best, but we want to learn lessons and implement sensitively at a local level.
If someone thinks a new idea won’t work there’s a platform to be heard, and for that feedback to be heard by other peers to try to influence them, rather than just a private email which only influences one person.
That environment requires a lot of psychological safety to work well.
Psychological Safety
Last year I read Fearless Organisation by Amy C. Edmondson. It focuses on this idea that nothing prevents and grips the mind in the same way as fear, and improving psychological safety is to create an environment in which people can ask questions and raise issues without fear of humiliation, blame, or being ignored.
It’s raising confidence for people to share concerns and be themselves.
Self-preservation is immediately rewarding, and speaking out brings risk with limited reward. Nobody ever gets sacked for sitting silently while things go wrong around them.
If you can’t criticise something that you can’t fully get behind then you’re not going to be delivering it with all of your ability. Maybe even with any of your ability.
It’s something I try to practice by being as honest and candid as possible with the team. We’ve seen our core business grow massively this year, with new services gaining traction, new launches, and acquisitions. There’s a tendency to only talk about the good stuff.
If we don’t validate the concerns of others, and talk candidly about the hard, hard times in the middle of that then you’re telling your team that those concerns aren’t real.
We all believe we are seeing reality, rather than a highly subjective view of the true reality. We often fail to wonder what others are seeing, or fail to be curious about how someone with a different perspective might see the situation.
We won’t always agree with that other perspective, but that doesn’t invalidate it. If someone believes it, fortunately or unfortunately, that makes it their truth.
If we only talk about the upsides you create a bullshit factory, where people spend all their time sharing how awesome and flawless they are. I don’t want to work with those people.
Growth
Going back to the earlier point on rapid growth - anyone who has been through it knows that it comes with pressure. You don’t have much slack, and it can feel like there’s little margin for error.
That’s exactly the place you need psychological safety.
Milestones come and go when you’re running a business, but for all of the growth we’ve seen there are simpler things that bring satisfaction.
Only about half of new businesses survive beyond the five-year mark. It drops to one in three making it to a decade.
We had our 6th birthday in November, so now our next big target is to make sure we’re one of the minority who make it to a decade.
Often we talk about big milestones like doubling revenue, hitting a certain turnover target, or another measure of growth as being cause for celebration, but I’ve learned to take more joy from other achievements.
I’m not a big believer in pride, but we’ve never missed payroll and now have a team of over 30.
If you’ve never run a business you might think that’s the minimum requirement, but anyone who has been in a leadership position knows what it means to manage growth while keeping the lights on.
That we’ve been able attract and convince this group of people to spend this part of their careers with us is worth more than anything else I could do with my life.
The next year is looking great, and it’s thanks to this team that I feel like we can really make it happen.
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