Building your Team

Shane and I had a great time at South by Southwest (SXSW) this year.  As the event slowly becomes more distant in my memory I’m attempting to post some of the learnings on the blog.  In this post I’m going to address the session titled, 10 Strategies for Building a Happy and High Performing Team, lead by Beth Hallmark and Drew Scherz.

Let me start by saying this was one of 2 sessions that we attended in a small room.  Both were extremely engaging because everyone had a voice in the conversation.  I highly recommend attending some small sessions if you plan to visit SXSW.

Beth and Drew work as team leaders in the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts overseeing Susan Combs’ award winning Window on State Government site.  Here’s what they handed us at the session:

1. Know what people like most about their jobs
2. Expect high performance
3. Find and hire high performers
4. Promote the power of the team
5. Share success and failure
6. Embrace the importance of dreams
7. Reign in the Ego
8. Celebrate Differences – especially among high performers
9. Remember, there are no guarantees
10. Know that “happy is” as “happy thinks”

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Sometimes I really debate writing about some of our more successful techniques. What if someone actually takes our advice and does something with it? Make our competitors smarter? Then I remember that there really is enough work for all of us (I absolutly believe that) and I unclench my ass.

The fact is that starting a conversation with a stranger is uncomfortable for most people. For the developers I know, it is often more so. After all, they did not choose a people oriented career. The problem we often face when recruiting: How do you make small talk with developers in a public space, get them to come out of their shell and talk to you? Our solution: Hang a sign around your neck.
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Today our good friend Iris from NextSpace asked us about our corporate culture mantra. Shane and I delighted in recounting it:

Happy, Helpful, Curious and Accountable.

As we recited our beloved chant, it dawned on me that it deserves a long overdue blog post.

What, you ask, is this 12 syllable slogan? It’s our cultural measuring stick. These are the words that we iterate whenever we meet someone new or review someone we’ve been working with. It applies both to our colleagues and to our clients.  In fact, we apply this gauge to everyone in our lives from presidential candidates to car mechanics. I asked Shane, who recently became a father, how he envisions his daughter as an adult. He thought about it for a while and after a couple days of deliberation replied,

I would be delighted to see Serenity grow to be happy, helpful, curious, and accountable.

(I am thrilled to report after the first 6 months, Serenity has a great head start on the “happy” part of the equation and is currently working on “curious”.) Continue Reading »

Lately we have been investing a lot of time and energy into sproutwire.com instead of sales. Meanwhile, our team has often been idle, developing their side projects, as we hunt for work. One great benefit and risk of working with independent contractors is that they are required to have other sources of income. This is great because it means we are not responsible for keeping our team working full time, but it is dangerous because it can easily lead to attrition. Eventually we all need to get paid. So how do we manage to keep together?
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One of the great challenges of working with a team of remote independent contractors is that there is no central office. People often say that by working with a remote team that is spread halfway across the globe, we are essentially missing hallway chatter. In other words, we’re missing a bond because we don’t run into each other and chat about things on a daily basis.

Since we don’t have a central office, we’ve decided to try a strategy of meeting with some of our most active team for a week in a Casa de Mar, a tropical resort in El Salvador (more photos to be uploaded when we get home and have a better connection). So far, I must say, the results have been spectacular (why don’t we have all our meetings in tropical resorts?)!

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Today I learned a lesson. It surprised me quite a bit as it counters a lot of my basic understanding of business contracts and relationships. It happened twice in one day and a little search on Google confirmed that this wasn’t some odd exception.

Two successful entrepreneurs I respect and trust enormously refused to sign our NDA. At first I was confused and worried. You see I was raised on the belief that in business, loose lips sink ships. I was under the impression that the proper procedure with any business idea was to get an NDA before sharing. I have a close relationship with both of them and asked why not. It appears that the business culture and realities of their trade make signing such a document unrealistic.
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I’m going to get a bit naked here. Maybe I’ve been reading Naomi’s blog too much (don’t worry, my mom washed my mouth out with soap as a kid, so I’ll never talk like her). A few days ago Julie and I took a series of walks, whose dialog revolved around perception, motivation and sex. I asked Naomi for advice because I wanted a woman’s view and found out that she and her lad had a similar dialog. So for the woman’s perspective, check out her post (should be up tomorrow).

Our dialog over the last weeks have made me think a lot about setting the stage for success and giving someone what they need to perform. What food feeds their soul? What projects do they excel at? What feedback do they need? What turns them on and gets them going?
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You know why you need a mentor. You took the time and energy to find one. If you haven’t yet: take your list of dreams, goals and aspirations for your personal life, find someone who has achieved the bulk of them in your industry (or if there are none, consider changing industry) and grab their coat tails and never let go. A bit of elbow grease and a whole lot of patience and interviewing will do the trick. So, now that you have a mentor, what the heck do you do?
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You need to tell any woman who you interview like me the following: This is not going to be like any interview you have ever gone to. We are not a large corporation … we are two guys running a small company and we really do care about your dreams and what you want out of your life.-J

We are not running a reality show. This is our life, and for all of you who understand how emotional and difficult interviewing can be, it should be private. That why I let this article sit in the fringe for a month before posting it.

I had no intention whatsoever of blogging about the interviews themselves. Until tonight. J asked me to tell the next people we interview the quote above. I asked her if I could write it on our site and she agreed.
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Nothing is more frustrating than to work hard and make a pile of money, only to lose it in a law suit or to the IRS. There are core people to each and every business team. Few are more important than your accountant and your lawyer. Having been through the selection process a few times, I figured it would be worth sharing some of the wisdom we have gained.
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