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What business lessons have you learned from scaling Hustle? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Ysiad Ferreiras, COO at Hustle, overseeing Sales, Marketing, and Operations, on Quora:
The single most important business lesson I've learned at Hustle is that you have to trust everyone you work with, and conversely, everything moves faster when people can trust you.
This has massive implications on teambuilding and recruiting.
Most companies scale by hiring from the immediate social circles of the founders. This is a very risky proposition: it means that the entire company's level of diversity and maturity will be a direct reflection of the founders.
To create a winning team, you want a collection of stellar individuals with complementary skill sets, who are good at cultivating trust, all working together to execute on a shared vision.
Various parts of that last sentence are fraught with risk.
Specifically, hiring stellar people with complementary skill sets is difficult. As a founder evaluating someone, you are unlikely to understand whether someone is stellar unless you've either done that job before (not sustainable) or have worked with that person directly and seen them execute in the past (may trigger the diversity problem above). You can have someone you trust who is a stellar interview a candidate, but you are still accepting risk. In spite of the risk, focusing on hiring stellar people allows you to avoid something worse: slowed productivity from non-stellar people, who tend to overcompensate by creating extra work for themselves and others.
Being good at cultivating trust is another important skill that is difficult to test for. In a startup work environment where everyone is shouldering more responsibilities than there are hours in a day, commitments will inevitably be missed. People who are good at cultivating trust own up to these missed commitments without being defensive. As a result, people around them trust them more and are empowered to do the same. All of us (including everyone in management positions) have the ability to make mistakes and have these mistakes be expected and non-defensively discussed, rather than turning into huge problems that risk dispiriting the entire team.
Another vitally important aspect of culture affected by trust is feedback. People good at cultivating trust invite others to give them feedback directly and do the work to manage their own defensiveness so they can respond in a welcoming manner. This is a learned skill that cultivates trust. High levels of trust are necessary for everyone to work well together without needing to get consensus and define everything before acting.
In hiring the best people we knew, without being 100% confident that they'd be great at the role they were playing, we needed to have the flexibility to redefine peoples' roles as the company's needs outgrew their level of competency, and at times, give people tough feedback that they needed to improve or were no longer a good fit. We were able, and continue to be able, to do this as we scale due to our commitment to cultivating trust and prioritizing timely, direct feedback.
I tried to address all these challenges through creating our “Cultural Commitments to the Business Team,” which everyone being considered to join my team reads and decides if they agree with before they join Hustle.
In case you find it helpful, here's the text of that document:
Cultural Commitments to the Business Team
- You'll always be measured on results, not effort. Automating and managing yourself out of a job is the pinnacle of achievement at Hustle. We want to encourage you to do that. As you do more of it, you get more indispensable because we want people like that around more.
- We'll never keep people around who make other people less effective. Creating additional work for yourself and other people is one of the worst things you can do. If you can spend a little more time organizing something to make it easier, or can avoid doing the work altogether, please do so.
- You'll never be reprimanded for taking action (with a couple small caveats). Action is better than procrastination or inaction. When you're not sure about something, you can gain immunity for acting by sending your action plan to your manager and giving them the opportunity to say “no” or “let's discuss”. Send, give a period of time for the person to respond, and then move forward unless the person says no. It's always ok to make a mistake once, but you're not allowed to make it twice.
- You'll never be told you can't take time off when you need it. We want you to have a full life. If you think you're burning out, let your teammates know as soon as possible so we can help you schedule a vacation proactively. You should treat your teammates with the same respect you'd treat one of our investors. Systemize your job by writing down the steps you'll take to do it. And train other people to do it/cover for you before you take your break. Then cover for them when they need to take time off as well.
- You'll always get performance feedback as soon as it's realistically possible. Hustle aspires to always have a culture of high performance. Part of that is creating a culture where people get and give feedback as quickly as possible. Getting feedback encourages self awareness. Giving feedback clears the air and provides the recipient with the opportunity to change. Assume the person giving you feedback means well, and might also be nervous giving you feedback. Make it easy on them by noticing when you are getting defensive and calling yourself out on it so they don't have to.
- You'll be treated as a human first, and an employee second. If you realize working here is no longer a fit and you need to leave the team for any reason, we'll support you. Hustle aims to maintain a culture where we know that each individual here wants to work here. As part of that, we are committed to acknowledging the reality that people's needs and preferences change over time. That said, unplanned departures are extremely disruptive to the business, so if you're having doubts and need to consider leaving Hustle, the best way to handle that is with open conversation. We'll work together to make a collaborative plan to roll you off your responsibilities and help you transition to another role at Hustle or another company where you think you'll be a better fit.
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