I reluctantly read the recent blog from Coinbase highlighting their new company policy that defines how team members will now be asked to show up in the workplace. I say “reluctantly read” because I knew where this was likely heading given the title. A policy of silencing team members in the name of heightening a company’s focus on vision and mission is being held up as the way for a company to build an enduring “championship” culture.
I disagree.
These are my sentiments on why creating a successful company requires the duality of focus and hearing every voice, not the false choice that the former is sufficient without the latter, and they reflect how we will continue to build our company culture at Remind.
At this point I’m never surprised by the ebbs and flows in the narrative around company building that emanates from Silicon Valley. Always present in this narrative is the hope by some that the hard work of company building can be succinctly reduced to an exercise in perfecting algorithms that reject the reality that humans with hearts, souls, and voices are what make great companies.
Companies make difficult choices all the time. As leaders it’s vital that we never make false choices — that we never choose to tell those who join our company and help us pursue our vision and mission that they must adhere to a code of conduct that requires them to silence their voices as a way to create the optimal path to company success.
Impact and sustainability are not mutually exclusive goals. They are the dual goals that every company must define for themselves and pursue relentlessly in a way that continuously views sustainability as a goal in service of impact. A company can (and should strive to) create massive positive impact in the lives of its customers and users, and that same company can do so in a highly profitable and sustainable way. In fact, that’s how a company ultimately scales its impact.
Establishing a culture that emphasizes focus and performance is absolutely critical to a company’s success, and yet it’s the effort a company puts into ensuring that every team member feels that they belong on the team that completes the formula for creating a culture that maximizes the dual goals of impact and sustainability over the long-term.
A company makes a false choice when team members are asked to extract parts of their heart, soul, and, most importantly, their voice, as a pre-condition for entering the workplace. We’re not only fortunate at Remind that our work supports the success of K12 and higher education students, but we are also fortunate that we embrace our diversity of voice so that we can empathetically engage with our users and customers across a similarly diverse spectrum. It’s this very human reflection that enables us to continually make Remind better and more valuable.
When you strip the heart, soul, and voice from team members and thus remove the most essential human dimension from your team, you still might win a few games, maybe even a championship one “season” driven by the chance alignment of a collection of homogenized talent (and serendipitous market conditions). But you won’t build a culture that endures this way. You won’t build a dynasty.
I shudder to imagine a workplace where a working mother isn’t able to voice openly what she needs in support of her ability to be both a mother and a team member in our current work-from-home environment, or a workplace where an LGBTQ team member feels they must mute the anxiousness they feel about how shifts in our judicial system might impact their rights, or a workplace where a team member who identifies as a person of color is expected to silence any feelings they carry given the social injustices they witness and experience daily across our country.
Choices are hard to make, but making false choices are even harder to live and succeed with. This is why we’ll never ask any of our team members to check the essence of their humanity — their voice — at the door when they come to work each day at Remind. #OTTG: One Team, Two Goals. E pluribus unum.
Originally published on Medium on October 2, 2020. This Substack version is maintained as the canonical archive.