ESSENTIALS MANAGEMENT For Johnson, the most important question on the survey measures: “Do I feel a direct relationship between the work that I do every day and the success of the company?” “It’s so important that people really feel connected to the impact of their work, and feel that they’re producing important business results,” she says. “It’s one of my favorite litmus tests for whether the organization is healthy or not.” While Stripe has performed well on this question to date, startups can use the results of this query to determine what to do next. If you get a negative response to this question, it’s likely that you’ve overstaffed, so that some people feel like they’re just doing busy work or they’re responsible for too small a fragment of the company. The other reason you might be getting this result is if either senior leadership or people’s managers aren’t very good at articulating the company vision and how it relates to the responsibilities at hand. Johnson recommends collecting sub-data on these questions to diagnose what the problem is. Regardless, it’s vital to ifx it. “I’ve seen a lot of mid-level managers be reluctant to own a founder’s vision, so they end up only weakly communicating how their team’s work is relevant to the organization’s mission,” she says. “The best managers make it their highest priority to connect the work their team is doing to the big, ultimate goals the company is working toward.” If you as a leader don’t believe that the work you do every day is important, your team isn’t going to believe it either. That puts you in a very dangerous spot. 6. Are we decentralizing decisionmaking? One of the biggest challenges any growing company faces is equipping employees with the information, agency and conifdence to make decisions for the company on their own. As a founder or executive leader, you can’t always be there to make a call. You have to trust that others can do it in order to keep pushing the frontier of your business. To make this possible, Johnson subscribes to the same method as medical residency programs: See one, do one, teach one. When you’re a surgeon, this is how you learn — and how you eventually become qualiifed to make snap, life-altering decisions in the operating room. This is also how you can train people up at a tech company — demonstrate how you want work to 73