Risk & Business Magazine Gifford Associates Fall 2017 | Page 14

TEAM CULTURE
BY: ARI MEISEL,
SPEAKER, BESTSELLING
AUTHOR & ENTREPRENEUR
Team Culture
There’s An App For That
O
n a Tuesday night in August
of 2015, we sat down to
have dinner at a restaurant
in lower Manhattan. When
we got up from the table
that night, the wheels were already set in
motion for us to create a new company
called Leverage. Today our company,
which provides the world’s most capable
on demand staff, relies on a team of nearly
100 independent contractors in 16 time
zones. The majority of them have never
met but our team culture is so strong that
they band together to do nearly 1000
hours of collective work each week and
describe the experience as the best job
they’ve ever had.
This didn’t happen by accident since we
knew how important sharing the right
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attitudes and behaviors would be the thing
that would lead us to succeed as a team.
The current state of technology and the
economy allow for infinite freedom. Most
freelancers can work just as well from a
hammock on a beach in Thailand as they
can at a coffee shop in Austin, TX. The
problem with that kind of freedom is an all
too common sense of disconnect. The lone
wolf worker begins to lack the motivation
that inherently comes from surrounding
yourself with people undergoing the same
struggles and triumphs as you. It becomes
difficult to feel or even recognize the
impact your work might have. Compound
remote work with the asynchronous
nature your communication tends to
take when working across time zones and
you’ve got a clear and present danger to
the efficacy of your team.
We have valued transparency since the
beginning. We have no corporate structure
nor do we have titles. People might own
a process, such as hiring, or content, but
that just designates them as point person
rather than a boss. We provide complete
access to new and old members alike to
contact us whenever they need help or
could use some guidance. If someone has a
question or needs something from us, they
can send us a direct message in Slack or
post a to do item in our public Trello list.
We also want people to have autonomy to
solve their own problems and encourage
an attitude of constant improvement. The
Kaizen system of continual improvement
pioneered by Toyota makes it so that
everyone is asked to make suggestions of
ways we can improve any and all aspects