ESSENTIALS MANAGEMENT Give employees the freedom to move and the time to learn, and you’ll reap many beneifts. It’s much harder for factions to form when people are happy with their work environment — and know that they’ll be supported in making changes when they’re not. Don’t be afraid of those transfers — it’s easier for your people to trust and collaborate with another team if you’ve previously been a member of it. It’s just another manifestation of that key antidote to factionalism: put company over department. If you’re nervous about disruption from team transfers, or if it’s too early in your company’s life to make that option available, there’s a lighter-weight place to start: cameos. Grosse pioneered the concept for the engineering team at SoundCloud, and it quickly became a cornerstone of the transparent internal communications that keep the multinational company humming. “I got the idea from a talk by one of Stripe’s founders about their total transparency. Basically employees can go to management meetings — even board meetings,” says Grosse. “So I started opening the engineering leadership meeting to any engineer. Their only duty was to send a written summary of the meeting to the whole engineering team.” Immediately, Grosse saw two beneifts. The ifrst and most obvious was a greater understanding of goals and process across the engineering org. The second was equally powerful: it forced leadership to think more carefully about how that meeting was run and ensure that it was something they wanted their team to see and hear. “To be honest, those meetings were kind of a shit show before that! Then suddenly we had a guest coming, and it was a completely different meeting.” Don’t be afraid to think — and act — outside the box. If you have a hunch that something might bring teams together, try it. Lotfesness recalls hearing a story from Marc Hedlund about his time as VP of Engineering at Sana Security. The leadership team was grappling with the age-old struggle of engineering versus sales, so they decided to try something new. “The VP of sales delivered a typical sales pitch to a simulated customer in front of the full engineering team, with a Q&A session atferwards. The beneifts were huge: It was obviously very rewarding for the engineers to speak up about the most outlandishly sales-y claims, and make sure the VP of sales wasn’t selling vaporware,” says Lotfesness. “But some of them also went back to their desks and started working on those crazy features. They saw that the VP of sales wasn’t pitching them to be a jerk — he just knew what was going to motivate current and potential customers.” 90