Rich Barton explains how leaders maintain culture as companies grow past 150 employees. Once informal processes break down, you need a repeated mission, lived values, and personality awareness. Zillow's CEO says the mission before every meeting and uses colored bricks on desks to show each person's dominant energy: red for competitive, green for collaborative.
Chapters
What are the levers I have as a leader at my disposal to build a culture of innovation and trust and respect and success. I'll append that, you know, the first one is the people point, okay? You gotta get in with the right people, okay? And so when you're small, the people point never goes away. It's really important. But when you're small, you know everybody. And so a lot of the more Dilbert Y processes, kind of big company processes, they don't come into play necessarily when you have a small team of people, okay? It's when you pass the Dunbar unit of 150 people or thereabouts, when you can know, you as the CEO, you as the engineer, you as the HR person can't possibly know everybody and know everything that's going on. And now you need to put in place a lot of these what younger people might view as bureaucratic or Dilbert Y. You guys know what Dilbert is, right? Anyway, like joking at big companies, processes and infrastructure in place. And part of that is laying out a really well defined mission, talking about values and then actually living those values in the company and reinforcing them at every point possible chance you have to communicate. And so the CEO of Zillow Group is a guy named Spencer Raskoff who is just unbelievable. And he has his mission thing that everybody says before every meeting. And he has the six values of the company. Stuff like move fast, think big. And those are emblazoned on the walls and those pervade his communications. That is one technique and if it's abided by, it works really, really well. Another one that I actually like that's kind of Dilbert Y as well is that that everybody does this kind of fun personality test at Zillow Group at least. And every company has some different mechanism. And the personality test ends up. It's kind of fun. Everybody likes to answer a bunch of questions about themselves and be told why they're so special and different. And it turns out that no matter what your strengths are, it's special and different and additive, which is true. It turns out a diversity of personality is really important in a corporate environment. And those things are translated into a series of colored bricks that sit on people's desks at Zillow Group. And if it's red on top, that means this person leads with red energy. They're competitive, they want to be told things quickly and then get out of my face. But then there are the people that have the green brick on top, which are they just kind of want to get along. They want everybody to get along with each other and cooperate. And it's a really interesting mechanism I found for people who are clashing with other people to look at their personality profile and say, oh, yeah, okay, that person, you know, Amy's the green on top person, so I'm going to have to actually behave a little differently. You know, these are silly sounding, corporate sounding things that are really important as companies get big.
