#QuotableMoment with Jay Simons of Atlassian on Scaling An Open Culture

Name: #QuotableMoment with Jay Simons of Atlassian on Scaling An Open Culture
Uploaded: 2019-03-12T22:42:02+00:00
Duration: 1 min 28 s
Channel: Jason M. Lemkin
Description: In this interview segment, Jay Simons (Atlassian) explains how the company scales an open, collaborative culture to a 3,500‑person organization. He…

12 Mar 2019 · 1 min

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1:28

In this interview segment, Jay Simons (Atlassian) explains how the company scales an open, collaborative culture to a 3,500‑person organization. He contrasts the ease of idea exchange in small teams (5‑15 people) with the complexity of surfacing the best ideas at scale, emphasizing that the core requirement is an environment where people feel safe and courageous enough to speak up. New hires are immediately told to challenge the status quo and point out problems, rather than merely making incremental improvements. Simons notes that achieving this level of openness across thousands of employees requires deliberate effort, structured mechanisms, and a strong cultural foundation that encourages psychological safety and active contribution.

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How do you process, especially in an open culture, how do you surface the best ideas out of 3,500?
So lots of different ways. I mean, one thing that we think a lot about is, you know, I think just this notion that when you think about scaling culture and scaling kind of the way that, you know, that teams come together and create ideas, like, you know, when you're 5 people, you're 10 people, like, of course it's easy. You're all in the same room and you're like, What about that? And everybody can kind of contribute to that. And, you know, we think a lot about like, how does that particular capability scale? And it's going to be different when you're 3,500 people. There's going to be different mechanisms. But I think if the underpinning of that is, again, back to openness, like a culture where people feel the courage to contribute, where people feel, you know, even when a new Atlassian joins, I think the first thing they hear is— and by the way, this is hard when things are going well, but the first thing they hear is like, don't be shy, come in here and tell us what you think is screwed up, what you think could be better, challenge something that we're doing that you don't understand. Like, that's what we need from you. If we wanted to hire you just to sort of like incrementally make us a little bit better, we probably, you know, we could have saved the effort. And so I think, you know, it takes a lot of work, but scaling the kind of collaborative culture that you have in the same room with 5 or 10 or 15 people up to 3,000, Takes a lot of work.