Building High-Performing Team Culture

"They're trying now to be the leader who everyone loves, but what really needs to happen very often is, we need to drive towards results. This employee continuing to not really do a great job at their job, you don't want to push them because you don't want to upset them. You don't want to give them difficult feedback, so you're just going to keep hoping it works out. Ultimately, that leads to the demise of your company."

"We really have an approach of very radical transparency about everything. Before we went public, we actually shared every bit of information with our employees. Instead of demoralizing people, I think that this is something that gives them a sense of deep partnership."

"When there are hard decisions to be made, we bias in favor of the customer. The customer's love, will they want to tell their friends, and neighbors, and family about it? And so I think that's the heart of it."

"So, in my opinion, I think that the only way to maintain moral is to make progress. I think that no speech, no sort of extrinsic motivators like we're going to give everybody some free crypto to keep motivated about it or something like that really works. I think people get really excited when they see progress."

"I think that's the other, maybe the key point here that everyone is exposed senior leadership, yes, we have a management structure because you have to, but that management structure does not interfere with the ability of anyone anywhere in the organization to look at what's actually happening. And that happens very directly."

"Yes, you are a data scientist, but your goal is to figure out what's happening. And if that means that you're going to pick up the phone and call customers, then that is what you're going to do to roll up your sleeves."

"Regardless of each individual saying, what was very clear was that the missing piece, the theme that was across all of that, is that I hadn't earned their trust. So whether how right or how wrong what I was doing was, is the key piece is that I wasn't bringing the team along with me."

"The most obvious kind of cliched one is culture. It is bread and butter to everything you do, from the people you hire to how you build the right mindset to just keeping the energy. I mean, energy at Airbnb was the currency. It was like, unless you didn't have that energy, nothing was happening."

"I now reflect back on just how powerful our storytelling was at Airbnb to get people pumped up. I mean, even for some of the smallest features that we would build, Lenny, they would kick off with the most powerful storytelling. I mean, we were changing lives."

"If you want to be in the 99th percentile in terms of outcomes, it's going to be really difficult. You got to sort of remind people that if they ever find themselves in the comfort zone at work, they are definitely making a mistake. It's supposed to be really fricking exhausting."

"Teams will always optimize for local comfort over company outcomes. The purest form of ambition and most intense source of energy in the business is the founder CEO. Every next concentric circle of management beyond the founder CEO has the potential to be an order of magnitude drop off in intensity."

"So we divided the team into these smaller groups for peer feedback groups and the idea is that they meet every two weeks or so, somebody brings something that's in a pretty rough draft that they want to get reviewed and then everyone's expected to give feedback. And because we've got people in there who are different leadership levels, it's a really good opportunity to model the kind of feedback that's helpful and the culture there is one of everyone lifting that person up to make their work stronger."

"One of the other things we do is we get everyone together just like every six months. So all of the product managers get together in the same place and the idea is to have a bit of an onsite. Now we start off with just doing something fun because everybody... As you might know, Atlassian is a remote organization, so everybody works remote all the time."

"I think often when there's difficult conversations, or those conflicts come up, you can put them off until they become much bigger. Or if somebody is conflict adverse, they can try to avoid having it at all. But by having a specific slot of time in your week for something like that, then you're sort of in that mindset."

"We have this ritual called Kudos Boards inside of FigJam, where everyone will shower each other with love and just kind call out their teammates for what they've done over the last week or so."

"80% of the culture of a company is literally defined by the personality of the founder. Our job as operators or as leaders is to help articulate the culture that they're creating."

"I think really defining that in your values, and values aren't values unless there's an actual trade-off. And so we had things like optimize for the long-term. There's a clear trade-off when we optimize for the long-term, you probably give up short-term revenue."

"The number one thing is context, no control. That's the reason why we're always encouraging people to see themselves as a business owner."