Risk & Business Magazine Knight Archer Insurance Magazine 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
attitudes and behaviors would be the thing
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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 com