Jay Simons (Atlassian) describes how an open culture—where employees are encouraged to speak up and challenge existing practices—helps surface the best ideas as a company scales. He contrasts the ease of idea-sharing in small teams (5–15 people) with the challenges of preserving that collaborative capability across thousands of employees, noting it requires deliberate mechanisms and cultural reinforcement.
Chapters
How do you process, especially in an open culture, how do you surface the best ideas out of 3500? So, lots of different ways. I mean, one thing that we think a lot about is, I think, just this notion that when you think about scaling culture and scaling kind of the way that teams come together and create Ideas, when you're five people, you're 10 people, 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 five or 10 or 15 people up to 3,000 takes a lot of work.
