Collective leadership

We want all employees to be leaders, drive change, and share their ideas—regardless of seniority, tenure, or title. We strive to create an environment in which every employee has the confidence to question processes, speak her or his mind, and contribute to our company’s ongoing evolution.

Systems Reviews

Our engineering management team wanted to capitalize on their group’s varied perspectives to tackle tough problems. So they developed Systems Reviews: one-hour sessions in which managers bring systemic issues to the table and prioritize them for investigation by a collective vote. What started as an experiment in democratized decision-making has proven to maximize collective knowledge and offer a stronger approach to problem solving. You can read more about using Systems Reviews in this blog post.

Leadership Dens

Some of our best problem solving occurs in safe spaces with trusted colleagues. Leadership Dens bring together groups of five to eight employees from across the company on a biweekly basis to share best practices and support one another through leadership challenges. Dens, which are organized into separate cohorts for people managers and independent contributors, are professionally facilitated and are governed by ground rules that allow for safe reflection. Employees have described dens as “awesome work therapy” and a “critical sanity check.” In 2015 we began training facilitators internally, enabling us to scale our Dens program.

Management Training

In 2015, we launched a company-wide management training program designed to strengthen and standardize core management behaviors across the company and equip managers with research-based approaches, techniques, and tools. The 12-week program includes workshops, one-on-one professional coaching by certified external coaches, and professionally facilitated Studio Groups – small peer cohorts that meet regularly, similar to the Leadership Dens program. By March 2016, over 70% of current managers had graduated from this program.