Optimal Self Management | Co-Founder and COO of 15five, Shane Metcalf (Podcast 83)

Because our belief is that a quarterly or a biannual performance review should really actually be geared towards helping somebody improve in ways that are meaningful to them and meaningful to the business. That it's not so much about getting a grade which actually create, you know, the research shows that, you know, ratings actually increase a fixed mindset and decrease. Whereas the way that we've taken this, which is all backed by the cutting edge social science, actually creates more of a growth mindset, helps people think about who do I want to become? What are the ways that I want to grow and develop? What are the ways that I want to impact company? How do I want to use my strengths at a more significant capacity? Am I really fulfilled by the work that I'm doing? And could there be a better role?

Shane Metcalf is a seasoned executive, coach and speaker who obsessed with building healthy organizations and creating the opportunity for people to have meaningful work and meaningful relationships. Driven by his deep belief in the potential for our species, Shane Co founded 15:5 industry leading performance management software that is unlocking the potential of the global workforce. As chief Culture Officer Shane understands what fundamentally motivates people, how to architect high performance and which principles and rituals create self organizing cultures. Along with his co founder David Hassell, Shane has developed the best self management methodology which posits that by supporting people in learning, growing and becoming their best selves over time, the natural byproduct is uncommonly high performance and loyalty. Shane, welcome to the second Ben podcast.

Cameron, it's a real pleasure. I've been looking forward to this for a long time.

I've Met David probably 15 years ago. We have spent a lot of time through the entrepreneurs organization together. We have talked a lot on the phone. I've been an advisor to 5015 five years ago, full caveat. I'm a small investor in the company as well and then also we've hung out at Burning man together a bunch of times. So why don't you just tell us a little bit about 15:5 just so we know you know what the company is and kind of understand that before we dive into everything else.

Yeah, sure. So 155 we are a continuous performance management solution. If you think about, you know, if we can unpack that a little bit so you think about traditional performance management of saying hey, we're going to once a year we're going to be through a performance review and then we're going to get essentially a grade for each one of our employees and then we're going to do things like stack ranking, use that Grade to determine whether we're going to promote people, whether we're going to fire people and kind of distribute rewards through the company. We have to remember this all came out of kind of industrial revolution mindset that, you know, once a year is a frequent enough time to get a pulse on how people are doing. You know, we kind of determine where we go from there. It's just, it's a massively inadequate model for this current day and age. Think about most employees get more feedback about what they eat for breakfast than what the work they did this past week, let alone the past three months, let let alone the past six months, let alone the past year. And so essentially what we're doing with 155 is we're looking at how do we create generative feedback loops inside of a company where we can influence the employee and manager relationship in a positive direction. Now we have a lot of tools for the heads of people, heads of HR or executives, so that you can get a broad overview of everything that's going on with your people. But the true north is positively influencing and improving the employee manager dynamic. You know, the stats are 70% of people leave their job not because of the company, but because, because of their boss. If we can influence that, we're going to have a profound effect on size at a company's performance, their retention, the overall culture. Because we think that if you ask better questions and have better conversations, you're going to see better results.

So I want to ask you a couple questions about that, about the tool itself. I was going to start somewhere else because I know the company a little bit more intimately than I would normally know on interview, but I want to lead off of some of what you just said. This tool itself is a pretty complex tool now, but it's also been. You've kept it pretty lean. But how do you introduce these methodologies to companies or systems to companies when they're not used to operating this way? Because you're getting them to change a little bit the way that they operate for the better. How do you get them to do that?

Yeah, sure. So, you know, just as a broad overview of the different solutions we do provide. So we have an asynchronous weekly check in. We have one on one agendas which are informed by the asynchronous check in. We have an okrs or goal setting, objectives and key results platform that's also flexible enough to accommodate most other goal setting methodologies like rocks. Then we also have performance reviews that we actually call best self reviews because our belief Is that a quarterly or a biannual performance review should really actually be geared towards helping somebody improve in ways that are meaningful to them and meaningful to the business. That it's not so much about getting a grade which actually create, you know, the research shows that, you know, ratings actually increase a fixed mindset and decrease performance. Whereas the way that we've taken this, which is all backed by the cutting edge social science, actually creates more of a growth mindset, helps people think about who do I want to become, how, what are the ways that I want to grow and develop? What are the ways that I want to impact the company? How do I want to use my strengths at a more significant capacity? Am I really fulfilled by the work that I'm doing? And could there be a better role?

It's interesting. I love that you talked about the rankings hurt performance. I just did a quick video this morning on LinkedIn and I was saying that the leader's job is really to do four things. Number one is to make sure your team is working on the right stuff so we get the highest roi. Secondly is to make sure their team has the skills to do the stuff that they're working on. Third, to make sure that they've got the confidence and they're excited about working what they're working on and then. And fourth is to make sure they feel loved and accepted and valued inside of this kind of group that they're in. And if they, if you do all those four things, you're going to get the results right?

Absolutely. I mean they're so. And they're so great because we could go full podcast on each one of those topics. How do you engineer a company that increases the likelihood that people feel loved and accepted and that deep sense of belonging? How do you make sure people are actually intrinsically motivated to do their work?

Lots to cover there for sure. You As a company, 15Five has really evolved over the years. When you first started, I think as you mentioned, you'd have the asynchronous check ins. 155 really was that pretty much at the beginning, right? It was just the report that takes your employees 15 minutes to fill out, takes you 5 minutes to read it. You kind of check in weekly. That was really how you started, wasn't it? And then you kind of evolved and built in the goal setting and then you built in the best self reviews. Is that accurate?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's interesting because the product has grown quite a bit. It's on the outside. It still actually occurs is pretty simple for the end User, you still do the check in and you know, you set your, your okrs, your goals at the beginning of the quarter, but then that's all integrated into the weekly check in. And so one of our core values is keep it simple, which is a hard value to keep simple. Simplicity can be enormously complex. You know, you think of the iPhone and how simple it is, but how much complex engineering goes into keeping it simple, simple. You know, engineers, when they join our company, they think, okay, it seems like a pretty simple product. Then they get into the code base.

And they're like, whoa, right, A lot of work to keep it simple.

So the heartbeat of the product still is the weekly check in and there's a lot more to it and there's a lot more to come there. Wrote some really interesting areas that we're excited about on the roadmap, but it still does come back to that weekly check in. It's just a, it's just a habit of gauging in a little bit of self reflection about how you're doing and what's going well and where you're stuck and answering, answering these simple questions that can really lead to some extraordinary results.

How do you balance as a company listening to your customer, listening to the needs of the product and not building something that's more and more complicated and, and really, you know, you think about Microsoft Excel with the thousands and thousands of features that nobody uses and then, you know, there's 12 that we all use. How do you balance out building out that insanely great product, keeping it simple, listening to your customers, but not overbuilding?

Oh God, I'm so happy that I don't have to be the one that it solves that problem because that is a real, it's a ball of yarn because we have to, we have to be responsive to our customers. And why I say that is that we have credible product leaders that are much smarter about how to balance all of these things. But certainly it is a mix of being responsive to customers. And as we sell to larger and larger organizations, the need, the needs of different sizes of organizations are vastly different. A 3,000 person company has a lot of very different needs than a 30 person company. And so it's about being able to build, build solutions that can really work for the larger companies, but that also don't overwhelm the smaller companies. Because you know, our stated vision is to help unlock the potential of every member of the global. We want to participate in the sea change of how we think about our people, how we create companies, how we manage our work. And so in order to do that, we need to build a product that is going to be available and accessible to a multitude. Do it of different sized companies. And so it's a little bit of the Steve Jobs approach of building things that our customers don't even know they want. So building a thing like having the vision of where this, this whole world of work is going and being able to build features that, that are a little ahead of that curve and then also being responsive to, you know, people saying, look, I need a very specific type of reporting available for when I run my best self reviews and I need to be able to extract this kind of data from it and have these kinds of insights generated for the specific teams. And so we say, ok, great, well let's balance that out. Is this feature going to generate universal value for the majority of our customer base? Because one of the worst things I think can happen to a company like ours is you get into custom engineering for individual clients.

Do you use all the features and functionality that 15:5 has internally at the company?

Yeah, so I run our instance of 15.5. For the most part. I'm the one that's in there tweaking and modifying and coming up with the question on a regular basis. I use probably 90% of it. There's a couple of things that I think that we could utilize a little bit more. I mean, we have some cool stuff that, you know, and in a way I'm almost a victim of kind of similar. If you're using, if you're used to using a product in a certain way and it grows in the time that you're using it, stay within the bounds of your own comfort zone because you're like, yeah, well this is how I know to use it. And so this is how I use it. You know, participating in our very thorough implementation process where we have, you know, implementation specialists and customer success managers training the whole company on how to use everything they, they almost, you know, I almost feel like we should have an implementation specialist for our own instance of 15. One of the areas that we could utilize more is in the personal profiles where you can have every single person in the company write out their aspirational job titles as well as listing out their strengths. And what's interesting this is, this is coming directly from the research that Adam Grant has done on job crafting where if you give people some of the autonomy to start thinking about, well, what are their strengths and passions, how does that match up with their skills? And you start to do a Little bit more of a customized job description and you start moving people towards like what we'd like to call it, like zone of genius. And you get people operating in their zone of genius doing the things that actually give them energy and are contributing value to the company. That's when you really unlock high performance. I think that there's ways we could utilize that a little bit more. And there's also ways that I'm waiting to catch up so that it's a little bit more in the natural flow of using it.

How do you sell into the big organizations or the mid sized organizations where you're trying to get your product adopted and you would love all the employees to use it, but clearly if you just got the marketing group, that would be a big win because then you can kind of grow. First, how do you get in the doors and secondly, how do you grow virally inside of the organization?

So one of the advantages that we have over our competitors is that we have self service. Any manager in the world can, or you know, English speaking world, I should say, can sign up for a self serve trial of 15:5 and then roll it out to their team and be up and running within a week. And so say you're in a larger organization and you have a team of 50 people, you can launch 155 with those 50 people. And we see this happen all the time. We get a foothold, they start getting that traction with those 50 people, start seeing some really interesting results. And then, you know, there's two things. One, we'll be paying attention to that. So then we'll send in an account manager, start having those conversations, start exploring what are the possibilities, get introductions upstream from them. But then also what happens is typically people start hearing about it inside the organization and say, whoa, that seems really interesting. I want to try that out with my team. And so maybe we'll get a couple of small teams inside of a larger organization and then, then we'll send in a sales rep and start talking to, you know, the CPO or somebody to say, look, you already have four teams using this. Let's look at what's possible if we were to get everybody at the company use. Because 15.5 is, it's almost like Metcalfe's law, which is, which is great since I'm a Metcalf, but is that the value of a network is square to the number of its users. Something like that with the telephone. Like the more people using a telephone, the more valuable telephones become.

Right.

And so inside of a company, the more People are in a company that are using 15 5, the more useful 155 becomes, because I can tag somebody in another department on a problem that I'm, that my direct report is having and then they're looped into that conversation immediately and we can begin problem solving.

In the, in the early days when, when you guys were starting, I was trying to get David to, to consider some way to create this viral nature to the product where occasionally you had to either send a report to another business area or tag someone, another business area or ask another business area about something and they'd be like, oh, what's this 155 thing? And not necessarily make them download the app and use it, but they had to kind of be exposed to it. Do you do that at all? Getting you into the other business area and has that been effective?

Yeah, well, I mean, I think that we're certainly seeing some organic ways that that happens. You know, Pie fives, which is our peer appreciation recognition tool, you know, just some quick notes like on appreciation, I mean we're seeing kind of ridiculous numbers where performance, if somebody feels appreciated and recognized at work, their performance. And this is almost hard to believe, but I just saw the stat that goes up 80%. Because part of what the new science of human thriving is really understanding is that humans have needs. You know, we have these fundamental needs that if met, lead us towards self actualization, you know, and a Maslow's hierarchy.

Yep.

And so there's belonging and esteem. And I think appreciation really goes right to the heart of belonging and esteem, that if somebody is actually recognizing you, thanking you for the very specific behaviors and results that you're generating, you're going to feel appreciated, it's going to increase the psychological safety, it's going to create an entire oxytocin and dopamine cocktail in your brain. Just your brain drips that and it actually changes your biology, changes your nervous system, primes your nervous system for success. And so if you're having that, if you, you know, there's another cool concept in positive psychology around the positivity ratio, which is the number of positive emotional experiences and interactions to negative emotional experiences, slash interactions that you have in any relationship. If you take this to the company wide level, you know, most companies are appreciation deficient and if you just get that ratio a little more imbalance, a little more, and some people say 5 to 1, some people say 3 to 1, there's some debate around what it actually is, but it's probably between three and eight positive interactions to every one negative. And so what high fives does is it immediately starts to increase the positivity ratio inside of an organization. The viral loop on that is that I had a cross collaboration with somebody. I want to be able to give them a high five. If they're not on 15 5, they'll still receive the high five. So I can, I can type in any email. I can type in my mom's email and give my mom a high five.

And she'll know that it came from 155 though.

Yeah, it'll come in at a 155 email and it'll say, mom, thank you for being the best mom ever. The way that you cared for me and loved me as a child and the way that you continue to listen to me and have deep and meaningful conversations about our lives is, makes me just so appreciate it and I'm really grateful. Thank you for being my friend there. She, she gets that, she gets that in the email and she's going to love getting that. And she'll be like, wow, that's really cool. And she'll see everything else that is associated with 155 and creates a little bit of an invitation into the.

25 years ago, that's how Hotmail launched. Their entire company was at the bottom of every email that said get your free Hotmail address. And that's all they did. It was just every single outward touch they had from people outside of their loop got infected with that virus. All of a sudden everybody wanted a Hotmail address. I don't know whatever happened to them. Talk to me about, about some of the PR that you've received. You guys as an organization have got a lot of press coverage. Why do you think that is?

Certainly you've been advising us for a long time on Maximize PR and it's actually really great. Just this morning we hired our first internal PR manager and so it's fine. I just had a one on one with her. She's a weekend and she, she, she's coming from the, you know, from an agency side. Four years of a fairly cutthroat PR agency and so she's like walking around our culture and in days like I can't believe this is real. Really people actually care about you. And it was fun hearing some of her war stories of what it's like working in a kind of hardcore PR agency. So you've been, you've been advising this for a long time. I was telling her that it was fun timing for me to have than one on one since you know, seven years ago you were saying hire a PR person Internally to just all day try to get us press. You know I think that we, we, we've worked with some great agencies over the years that have also really played a big role in helping us get some really good pr. And I feel like we're just starting to really find the things that resonate in a really big way. And there's a fun story recently that actually put us on the map in a pretty big way which is we recently decided we have a something that internally that we call the Best Self Academy. This is a resource library of resources and experiences that we pay for our employees to have access to. And so there's a couple of different workshops that we'll pay for people to go to if they want to. All voluntary. We don't force people to do anything, you know that have made really significant changes and create a transformation. Both David and I's like and we said well why wouldn't we want everyone to have access to this because people don't even know they exist. And so this year we were thinking about it and we were saying, you know, what are some of the other really impactful, impactful experiences that we've had that we think would benefit the majority of media? They were like well Burning Man. I've been going for 12 years. David Scon. Me and David have had some of our best one on ones @ Burning Man. You know, real heart to heart. Like key moments of struggle and breakthrough in the company have happened at Burning man for us personally. So we decide let's include anybody at 155 we will buy your first ticket to Burning. That was really fun because a it's personally meaningful for me to be at a point where we can do that and I can say all right, we've got about 170 people and so we'll buy 160 tickets to Burning Man. If every person wants to go to Burning man, we'll buy every single person a ticket to Burning.

I think the reason you've actually received so much PR as a company is less about my systems and it's more about the fact that you guys have been a very heart centered company and very focused on culture which is not about the perks and very kind of open and trans, open and vulnerable. And I think that has the media has treated you very kindly because they, they trust you, they believe you. It's a lot of your media has been about your customer successes as well and how the products are changing companies and lives. That's been less about, look at us, look at us.

I mean And I think that's the real interesting story, right is like how do we rehumanize business? How can we build our company is where we get to bring our full selves to work and we get to actually become better people through the experience of work. We spend so much of our time at work. If it's actually a generative upward spiral where we actually grow in our relational skills, we grow in our ability to empathize and listen and understand people and, and get curious and give feedback with kindness and curiosity that's going to radiate into all areas of our life. We're going to have better relationships with our family, our loved ones. We're going to have better friendships, more meet, more debt. And so I think that, yeah, that it really has been one of the primary goals of us building this company and it's great to see. I think we have amazing timing as well, Cameron, that the rest of the world is starting to understand these things are important. Important.

I think you're being too nice to yourself. I don't think it has much to do with timing at all. You started this company how long ago? Ten years ago.

I joined eight years ago. David was working on it for I think 10 years about now.

Right, okay. So like, you know, it kind of takes a long time to get to the night before you become the overnight success story. So we're going to talk about the fact that you just raised 35ish million. So.

Right, yeah, yeah. So we raised 31 in a series B and right before that we raised 8 million in Series A.

Okay, so I want to go prior to the 8 million you guys were on Vapor, David was going through a divorce of quite an amicable one with he and his ex Casey. Very kind of heart centered, focused on their little boy. Wonderful that they were able to go through it as friends, which is great. But struggling hard emotionally but struggling on cash, you guys just didn't have any cash and you were kind of running along at, you know, you'd add four customers and lose two and you'd add three and lose one. It was like, I don't know where this is ever going to become a company. It's kind of cute and I like the tool. But how did you guys get through that?

It's quite interesting because, you know, when we had hundreds of thousands, not tens of millions in the bank, actually there's ways that we felt very secure because we were cash flow positive. You know, we have about three, three, four years of being cash flow positive. And so we didn't have. We had vapor in the bank but we knew we were default a lot.

Yeah, you were default a lot. You're right, you were growing and it was okay and you weren't burning, but it was just. But how do you go through that as a company especially you're based in the Bay Area. You're based in this kind of center of like raise, grow, raise, grow. How did you guys work through that with your teams? How do you work through that psychologically? And what do you focus on when you can't just go and spend your way to success?

Yeah, sure. So I mean our perspective was that VC money is not figure shit out. You know, VC money isn't. Well, we think we have product market fit, but we don't really know. But we're going to say we do. And so we're going to go raise millions of dollars just try to brute force our way into product market fit. And we said look like think we aren't going to. We probably could have raised an A well before we actually did. But we really wanted to figure out repeatable scalable lead generation and sales systems before we put all the money into it. Because then it would be, you know, just pouring, having a jet engine that we think weren't really confident in and then burn a bunch of money through it to see if we could get lift off. Instead we really took a look approach where we said let's grow slow and steady. You know, we were, we were growing. It was a little bit more of a ultra diet. Jason Calcanis called us the ultra marathon runners of the portfolio. You know, just kind of slow and.

Steady, slow and steady.

So what we did in that time, and I think this is a real blessing, we got to continue to refine our culture. We got to continue to refine our philosophical perspective on, on how to treat people internally. We kept a very strong, shared, powerful context that the purpose of our company is to unlock the potential of every member of the global workforce. We use that as the true north, the magnetizing element that would create cohesion and alignment. We continue to get to know each other as a really a small, intimate, you know, I mean we were sub 30 people for most of that time. We got to develop such a solid bedrock of our culture. Eight years we've had five people voluntarily leave the company. One of those people, you know, might come back and then it's down to four. So you know, virtually zero turnover. We got to continue to invest in people's own personal development because we have all of these cultural rituals and Practices and group habits that we do that default move us towards more connection and more vulnerability and more trust.

What do you think you can do better as a team? Where do you think you guys can improve in that area?

Well, I mean accountability, you know, so when I occasionally every other year or so I run Patrick Lencioni's five dysfunctions of a Team assessment. The leadership team. One of the areas that we've not been as strong on is accountability. We get really high marks on trust and conflict and commitment and results. But accountability is usually the lower one on the totem. And it's interesting because if you know David as you do, you know David's somewhat conflict averse. He's a 9enneagram which. So it's kind of like hey let's, let's kind make peace. Let's not necessarily do the things that like holding people accountable in ways that make them uncomfortable. I think we've grown a lot in that in the last two years. Our CRO, Brad Gidy I think is actually really strong on that line of development and so he's brought in some really great energy into the team and you know, Brad's been a phenomenal contribution to the whole company and helping us create the scalable sales team processes. You know, because we're moving into higher and higher stakes games, you know, we are just default alive. We can keep running as long as we want.

Yeah, you're great.

Regardless of our growth rate, it's now like oh okay, cool. We just raised you know, $39 million and there's some expectations that have come along with that money. And so it's about how do we, how do we create extremely high levels of psychological safety while also holding people accountable to extraordinary levels of performance? Because we need the space is getting so much recognition and we're signing up for continued massive growth. And all that really does require I think high degrees of accountability on, on everyone's part.

What is changing now that then you've got this cash. Where do you guys have to to change? I know you're not pivoting in terms of the product or service, but where are you starting to focus your time.

That maybe you didn't before historically been underinvested in product? You know we had a very lean product team and we did incredible things with very few people. One of the main reasons why we decided to raise the Series B was to be able to be over invested in product and overinvested. I just mean compensate and catch up a little bit and be able to accelerate our Product because there's so many cool things that we want to do that we need to do in the product and that is kind of fun. Fun thing is once a year we have a company wide retreat and we bring everybody together in and for kind of a three day, three and a half, four day transformational business retreat. I take all of them from Burning man and Landmark Forum and you know, all these different kind of transformational experiences with some, you know, smattering of business strategy thrown in there and create these incredible experiences and that's really fun. But in January we had 70 people in the whole company. Right now this week the product and engineering teams are meeting in Portugal for their own little meetup and that's 70 people alone. It's really exciting because we've been in this mad hiring dash all year and we now have for the most part really solid engineering and product team that is already starting to move the needle really fast on what we're able to build and the quality of what we're building.

What's going to change with your leadership team and your management team now that you have this extra cash and do you have to bring in the next layer of talent or do you just have to keep focusing on growing the team you've got? What are you focusing on there?

Yeah, leadership team is definitely growing. We're, you know, we're, we've got for the most part every bench filled. Most of the bench is filled. We are hiring a CFO right now and so that's going to be really exciting and I think that's going to be a really kind of CFO operations and that's going to I think be really helpful on a number of fronts. But you know, we've used third party firm until now for, for finance and we have enough money moving through the business now that we really need somebody full time internally that understands all the nuances, sits in on all the leadership meetings, it knows the flavors of everything that's happening and isn't, you know, each one of us on the leadership team going and making our wish list of the third party consulting firm and saying, and them saying yeah, sure. And then realizing all the puzzle pieces don't fit together because there wasn't one master architect sitting in the center of everything.

Yeah, that's a dangerous stage. You and David co kind of founding this company, kind of growing it really from the earliest days. How do you divide and conquer? How do you split up your roles and responsibilities between the two of you?

Of all I so grateful for David, David's been was one of the greatest blessings in my life and our relationship and you know, we're, we're closer and trust each other more than we did at the beginning and we're more excited by the work that we're doing as a company. When we started the company, what's great is that we have a really deep philosophical alignment around the purpose of the company and the purpose of how we want, the impact we want to have on the people internally and on the world at large. One of the great things that I have as Chief Culture officer is I'm not in opposition to my CEO. I'm not fighting and trying to like convince him that hey, people are important. We need to invest in our people. We need to maintain an extraordinary culture. That's a default and a full alignment from the whole leadership team. David's primary responsibilities in the company are to keep, keep it funded, make sure we always have cash in the bank and enough money, enough capital and access to capital to do whatever we need to do as opportunities arise. Some set some of the strategic level of where we're going. And you know, David's a number one, one strength is futuristic and so he's constantly looking several steps ahead, creating the alignment and strategy from there and then managing the leadership team and making sure that everyone is set up for success. What I do a I still figure out what I'm doing every day. We have something pretty special. I mean we have a five star rating on Glassdoor which is pretty uncommon for our stage, for the number of people that we have, almost zero turnover internally. The people that we want to stay, almost every person stays things. And so my, my job is to ensure that we to the best of our ability scale the magic that we have as a culture. I can no longer go around all of our offices and meet with every person in the company and you know, just do that through brute force. It's really about continuing to scale our systems and processes to ensure that everybody has a voice in the company, that our managers are the best managers on the planet. It, you know, one of my goals is to be able to put on the website and we're not quite there yet, but I want to put on our website that the best perk at 15 5amongst the perks that we do have is that you're going to love your manager and if you don't, we're going to do something about it. Whether it's getting you another manager or helping you have a breakthrough with that man, because it all goes back to the manager. You know I can have the most incredible 155 global culture, but if you don't like your manager, your manager doesn't like you. You don't have to have a good communication style together. It's going to break down and you're going to leave.

It's interesting I think back to years ago when we were building one, 800, got junk and one of the business areas I grew was the PR team. And I at one point had them up to about six full time in house PR people that were just cranking out stories. We landed 5200 stories about the company in six years. But at one point we needed them to have someone to report to. We were also going to build a national account sales team. So we wanted to hire a VP of sales and we let the six PR managers actually interview and select and hire their VP that they would report to. So you talk about like loving person that you're going to report to. Well, you got to pick them so they couldn't complain about their boss anymore. It was like you picked the guy.

And again it's about giving people some of that autonomy, some of that control. People want to have a sense that they have some, some say on their destiny. And so if you just top down this is your new boss. Love them or leave that alone. Set somebody up to probably not like their boss because they don't have a voice, they don't have an opinion that's actually listened. Not that we need to run everything like a democracy and everyone gets an equal vote. That's not. That can also be a really troublesome model in general. Including people in decision making process is a really valuable way to help people feel valued.

What do you think the biggest insights are that you've learned about operations and leadership from your customers using 55.

1. Everybody uses the tool in slightly different ways. Even a couple years ago I ran a report and we had over 10,000 unique questions asked through the platform every week. There's a lot of different priorities in companies. I think there's some real universals around improving employee manager conversation is always going to win. But companies have are at different stages of growth and development and have very different needs at those different stages. And if you can find the right questions, you can solve whatever the problem is that you're currently facing at that level of growth and development as a company. It's kind of like in strengthsfinder one of the strengths is called individualization which is understanding that everybody's an individual. And if you understand what uniquely motivates them, then you're gonna help unlock their potential. And so I think that understanding that every company is also an individual, every company is unique, being able to have. That's where I think our CSMs come in play, is helping companies understand the right strategy, the right questions to ask the right things, to really be paying attention to right conversations to start having as a collective. That is how you're going to navigate the individual complexities of that company.

All right, last couple questions. If you were to think about the last 10 years for you or eight, 10 years, where have you had to continually work on yourself and your strengths as a COO or second in command? Yeah, yeah.

One of the interesting things that has been in the last couple of years is actually really leaning into more of my public speaking. Even just three years ago, we were at one of our company retreats and David asked the question, what would have to happen in the next year for you to know that it was a really like a breakthrough year? And I kind of sheepishly said I'd speak at one business conference and immediately regretted seeing Ben. David, of course, course, weeks later passes me over an opportunity to speak at a conference. Damn you, David. And I've always had a love hate relationship with public speaking. And, you know, and so I did like one talk that year. Last year I did like 40. And I've done not only 60 or 70 this year, you know, a variety of webinars and stages and keynotes, you know, just kind of full gamut meetups. Any kind of opportunity I could get to get in front of this audience and open my out I've said yes to. And it's cool because it's really, you know, the journey of public speaking. And you probably know this as a speaker. And so being able to get up on stage and speak authentically, it's kind of the journey. It's a hero's journey through your own deepest insecurities to be able to get good at speaking. Or at least it was for me, that has been one of the most transformative. And in a way, it's one of the most recent, I would say, but has also been one of the most rewarding for me personally.

So, yeah, I've always told people that we've always been good at speaking. We've been speaking since we were one year old. One year old. What, what we're bad at is speaking from a stage. And if we can just somehow go on stage and speak to the audience like we speak to our friends, it resonates. But as soon as we try to be a Speaker. Then it gets. It all breaks down because you're in your head the whole time. How about if you were to think back. Last question. Think back to when you were 21 years old. You were just kind of embarking on your business career. What word of advice would you give yourself back then that you now know to be true, but you wish you'd known a lot Younger. Younger.

Oh, it's that I love that question. Because 21 is a really interesting age for me and I think I would say follow the path, like trust that you taking the path less traveled. Because essentially I dropped out of the business world for seven years in my 20s and I pursued all kinds of crazy personal development paths and lived in strange intentional communities in the Bay Area and went much more on the personal development, interpersonal development, you know, took every transformational course I could find in the Bay Area, which is, you know, endless. And it was cool. But I was definitely in this period of, oh man, I am so broke. You know, like, I have a giant gap on my resume. It's a hard one to explain because I was doing shit that was. Wasn't conventionally respected as a professional career. It's so interesting is that it was all of those experiences, everything that I picked up, who I became in those experiences and the tools I gained that I've used to build 155 and is directly correlated to the culture that we have today. And so I would say I would just tell my 21 year old self, like, have faith, follow your own path. Like, don't conform, go against, go against the grain, do the things that nobody else is doing and trust that it's going to lead you somewhere that is beyond your wildest imagination.

Totally got it. Yeah, it makes sense because if you just trust that journey and you're following some passion, it's going to continue. You're going to pick up all the learnings along the way. Shane Metcalfe, the co founder, founder and chief culture officer for 15Five. Thanks very much for sharing with us on the Second in Command podcast. I really appreciate it.

The beauty of being inside a smaller organization is we focus a lot on controlling the controllables. I'm a big believer you can't really dial up a culture. You can't order an organization to believe certain things. It's either going to be innate and it's going to come from within in the organization by having a very clear set of priorities and a way by which you go about doing your work.