ESSENTIALS MANAGEMENT “I deifne a faction as a subset of the company that starts to put its own priorities before the priorities of the company. It may form for a range of reasons: they’ve got a particular ax to grind with a colleague, a speciifc goal they believe is more critical than the current priority, or a distinct way that they want to do their work — and that becomes more important than building a great business. Then you’ve got a faction,” says Lotfesness. If your team is no longer working together toward a shared vision for the company, it’s time—past time, really—to do something about it. Here are ifve areas where positive action can prevent factions or mitigate them before they fester: 1. HIRING “Everything begins with hiring. The seeds of factions start there,” says Lotfesness. “The number one mistake companies make is not hiring people with values that are consistent with the founders’ vision.” You hear a lot of talk about “culture ift” in Silicon Valley and beyond, but Lotfesness has found that the term implies the wrong kind of homogeneity — and can actually discourage genuine collaboration. What you’re really looking for is a values ift. “I think that’s a way that you can allow for broad-based hiring — hiring for differing backgrounds and perspectives — which can be helpful when you’re trying to build an innovative product.” For his favorite example of this principle in action, Lotfesness leaves tech behind and considers that most famous team of rivals: President Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet. “In her book about this, Doris Kearns Goodwin describes how Lincoln convinced the rivals that he beat for the nomination to join his cabinet, knowing that they bitterly disagreed on key issues. Lincoln’s ability to use divergent perspectives to inform his decisions may have saved the country. Despite their differences of opinion, they all believed in democracy. They all believed in a government of the people, by the people, for the people. Nobody disagreed with that. What they disagreed about was how you manifest those principles in the speciifc practices of government.” In all the hustle to ifnd product/market ift or resonant branding, don’t forget to establish your company’s immutable values. And be precise; explicitly deifning each one is part of predicting and preventing conlfict. At eero, for example, ambition is a core value. “Ambition can express itself as getting to the next rung of a career ladder. Or it can be deifned as bringing on people who are driven by new challenges in an entirely different space than where they were classically trained, which is part of how I ended up working on a hardware product with a sotfware background,” says Lotfesness. “Our founders were bold enough to jump into an entirely new area and successfully ship an innovative product, and that’s a quality we want to see in our new hires as well.” 82