“Diversity in counsel, unity in command.”, Cyrus the Great — inspired me to share a story of understanding unity itself.
I am an introvert with PhD in Computer Science, who failed 6 times with tech products and learned by my own experience to be a listening extrovert and leader for a 55-people software development company I’ve learned about trust, team-building, and feedback culture a hard way. And it all started 10 years ago.
Losing 1/3 of a team, making a $1mln loss, and hitting the glass wall with no-empathy to my team made me sick of myself. Being too intellectual limited my curiosity to a desire to be always right and do everything my way. It took me three years to get through guidance to life. Books helped a lot (a.o. The Achievement Habit, Emotional Intelligence, Positive Psychology, First Among Equals, Radical Candor, Powerful).
A year ago, during my trip to Copenhagen for TechBBQ, I’ve joined The Open Organization workshop, led by Red Hat’s People EMEA, Emilie Ilian, who shared some lessons learned from her journey on scaling 8-people HR team to 150 people in an open-source company. I was even happier to find that Red Hat’s CEO, James M. Whitehurst, authored the book “The Open Organization”.
This brought me to a conclusion, how can we summarize the recipe on opening our firms for people, meaning opening mind and heart.
1. Start with a purpose. Or Why, as Simon Sinek calls it. Structure it, share it, preach it. People love working for more than just money. The Hedgehog Concept, introduced by Jim Collins in Good to Great, helped me to start with mine, eventually to find my personal Ikigai. In COVID-19 times it helped to unite an Ikigai-team of tech-samurais to fight the fake news in Poland or organize a biggest online hackathon.
2. Look for similar-minded people, with different strong skills than yours. StrengthsFinder (by Gallup) might help you, still should not limit your thinking, to pair with such. Mine made me select the right talents to fill the gap of my weaknesses.
3. Involve people. Every five years, a company should reframe and remind its people — why we do what we do? What drives each of us? What are the goals? We need to ask all of our people as they will form the foundation for lighting up a fire of purpose.
4. Be flexible. Keep asking questions like “Why is ABS company the right name for you?”, “What do you believe in a company?”. You will find new inspirations and points of view to enhance, improve, or even disrupt your initial vision. That’s a never-ending process. As Jeff Bezos said: “The smart people change their minds.”
5. Engaging people in the improvements and co-creating a culture brings benefit to both sides. Appreciate sharing the ideas and be humble. One example: salary-negotiation process. In DO OK all leaders went through a disruptive process of promotion and creating a growing framework for people. It took me nine years to understand what trust and openness can create together. If people are led in the right way, with trust and respect, they will help your company to get to the next level of maturity and readiness for further journey.
6. Openness pays off; even with government reps. Case of Red Hat’s labour union rep in France convinced me of the above even more. First, even employees didn’t want to have one. Eventually, because of law, they had to accept, and now for seven years, there were no issues or tensions, just partnership.
7. Focus on a good solution, not ego or being right. The Meritocratic approach helped to overcome those ego-centric pitching of own solutions. It’s OK to choose what is the best solution, not the most “voted”. Asking self-check questions like "Does it contribute to a company's goodwill and is in a line with ethics?" saved me, as a CEO, a relationship many times.
Remember, that It’s OK that people have different opinions or personally disagree, but if a team commits to one solution, you should work that way, too.