10 years and 10 lessons
Celebrating 10 years building and growing
Last week I hit 10 years of working at the company that started out as ArchiveSocial. The date snuck up on me but I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the last few days. Anniversaries can be a trigger that forces some introspection, so I’m going to lean into that this week with 10 things I’ve learned over the last 10 years.
1) A career in three years
One moment stands out when I was talking to the early team of three at Fullsteam. ArchiveSocial’s founder Anil told me, “If you join a startup you’ll have a career’s worth of experience packed into 3 years.” By that math, I’ve experienced about 3 careers at this point?
Whole departments formed out of the tasks I was fitting into blocks of time in the early days. The people who took the reins discovered things that would have helped me so much if I had known them when I was first making stuff up. I might have worn many hats early on, but the real experience came by keeping my customer experience hat, my recruiting hat, or my sales hat in my back pocket while people in those departments grew and learned.
2) Reinvent regularly
Every couple of years the company I was at completely changed. It might have been a new project, people coming and going, or mergers and acquisitions changing the landscape. The small startup I joined 10 years ago transformed 8 years ago and was replaced with something more exciting. Each of these cycles I got to work with some of the most important people in my life. This happened repeatedly.
I had to come to terms with this cycle early at a small company because the changes are so noticeable and meaningful. A larger organization experiences the same thing but some of the sharp edges are smoothed over and the occasions aren’t as purposefully marked. I’ve seen these changes catapult the group to the next level over and over, embracing the change means we get to be part of it.
3) Find your delighters
The moments I look back on the most fondly are the little things that someone did but they didn’t have to do. Our product owners call these “delighters”. It might have been celebrating a win with a bottle of whiskey, finding a 3d printed animal, enjoying a donut when someone new was welcomed, being paired with a new remote friend and enjoying a virtual #donut, escapes with the team down to the ice cream shop, team lunch conversations, watching the sales team shoot objects off of Isaac’s head with foam arrows, or unified clapping during standups.
This is only a small list of little moments that have changed what I believe a workplace can be. Every one of these started with someone saying, this would be fun, let me introduce it to the group. Spread joy in the little things.
4) Empathy is the first step
If you don’t understand the person you’re solving a problem for, you’re going to solve the wrong problem. I learned so much talking to our customers on the phone and understanding the excitement and purpose that civil servants around the country bring to their work every day.
Understanding the frustrations and pain points helped me look past “Clark problems'' and start solving real problems. Starting with empathy applies to everyone we interact with from the customers we work for, to the people we work with. A little empathy goes a long way toward the things that really matter.
5) Make space for trust
The nice thing about programming is everything gets checked into systems that track the whole history of a project. I recently looked back on this history and it was shocking how quickly Anil trusted me to make some pretty dramatic changes to our systems. In the first few weeks he headed to a Code for America incubator and it was my job to keep the servers running. Within months I had overhauled our build system and in the first year we were using a completely different approach to capture.
Nothing is possible without trust. The faster a team can trust each other, the faster it can accomplish big things. Trust happens by offering other people the opportunity to break things. If they break those things, you give them the opportunity to fix them. The guardrails we set up might make us feel safe, but only give us the opportunity to trust the guardrails. Take a leap and give people the opportunity to trust them.
6) Fight ideas not people
Fighting people builds walls, but fighting over ideas can be transformative. When you have trust, you can debate the direction without fighting the person. This can be the most difficult and most important thing you can do.
When I look back on the forks in the road over the past 10 years, I think of the passionate discussions. Many times we’d start firmly committed to a solution. Hours later we had complete flipped sides and found ourselves arguing against our original position. By building shared understanding and respect, the path forward can become a lot clearer.
7) Transparency brightens all things
Putting ideas or unfinished work into the world is uncomfortable. This leads us to be guarded with our work, or worse begin to think that secrecy gives us power. Just about every bad pattern I’ve seen in organizations can be countered through transparency and making information more available and more accessible.
When expectations fall out of line with reality they have a tendency to snap back painfully. Transparency diffuses these tensions. It allows people to openly question the bad systems that have formed. It also allows people to explore problems and offer solutions outside of their immediate world. Transparency is the light in the darkness and it starts with everyone of us.
8) Give the wonderful a chance to sprout
Top down change can be quick, bottom up change can be lasting. The systems we build can either reward or punish people for introducing new ideas or fun experiences. When we look around and ask why someplace is boring, it’s usually not the people. Quite often, the exciting or innovative things weren’t given a chance to take root. Find ways to encourage the joy that people naturally want to bring to their days.
9) Culture is us
Culture is the cumulation of the people at a place at any given time. People don’t get to realize the impact they have because they never get to look in on the before and after. Seeing truly creative and charismatic individuals join and then leave, I got to see some of that impact. The tiny traditions one person starts can become a core piece of a team’s identity.
We all drive culture. Every day we wake up and shift things a small amount through our interactions. The positivity or negativity we express, the mantras we espouse, these all get picked up and amplified back to us. These feedback loops can become the toxic workplaces that we flee from or the once in a lifetime experiences that we look back fondly on.
10) The secret to happiness
The Harvard study of adult development is a 85 year old research study following a group of 724 individuals and surveying them every 2 years. It started in 1938 trying to answer a single question, “What makes us happy in life?” The biggest takeaway, happiness comes from building meaningful relationships.
The through-line of all of the above points is all of the people who have been on this journey with me. I have learned from you, we have grown together, and all of these moments we’ve shared have been incredibly meaningful. Work can be the source of a paycheck but it’s also an opportunity to build deep relationships. Thank you to everyone who has brought me so much joy!
