While we are a team and our success is dependent upon how we interact and support each other as a team, the reality is that many people may come and go and the only constant is me. It’s important that my implicit expectations are explicitly stated so there is no confusion about them and you’re not left to guess at how you can succeed at iPullRank. To some degree, this is a restatement of the tenets in PROUD in a less colorful way, but clarity is parity.
Extreme ownership is how you succeed here. Aside from design work, every role in this organization is one that I have done well. The deliverables we create have all been developed by me. In hiring you, my expectation is that you either are or will proactively grow to be better at what you do than I ever was.
The following are a series of directly and explicitly stated principles or actions that you should always follow in order to be successful when working with me.
- Be respectful – I make it a point to be respectful of and to you. Please be courteous and offer the same respect back. I will not tolerate disrespect to me nor to other members of the team.
- Take extreme ownership – The most important thing you can do when working with me is to take complete and utter ownership over your work.
- Results over everything – Completing the work is not the result. The impact of the work is the result. Completing a deliverable is the first step towards getting a result. If you complete a deliverable and the customer does not act on it, then we did not get a result, the client has wasted their money and we have failed.
- Research first – While I am a resource you should use and use regularly, you should always research your question before bringing it to me. You should look to me as a person to help you to decide between options rather than the person you use to solve your problems.
Spend 15 minutes researching your problem in a search engine before asking me how to do it. If you still have no idea after that 15 minutes of trying to figure it out, bring me what you’ve found and let’s discuss how to make it happen.
- I’ll let you slide, but I have a long memory – I am very compassionate to the needs of others and, as a personality quirk, I often don’t react negatively nor do I have an outsized reaction when people fail to deliver. Some take advantage of this because they believe they got away with something or they have not identified a boundary and therefore don’t take personal accountability. Doing this is a mistake because it leads to me reaching a point where a team member becomes entirely intolerable and then they wonder how they got to that point.
Recognize when you’ve failed and proactively take steps to not make the same mistake in the future.
- Do it the first time – If something has been assigned to you or asked of you, take ownership of it the first time rather than needing to be told several times.
- Keep up your end of the bargain – We are all here to complete the same mission. We all want to do great work, get results, advance in our careers and, of course, be compensated fairly. I believe wholeheartedly in taking care of people and I will always go out of my way to make sure that that happens. I simply expect that you will honor your side of our agreement and follow through on what’s expected of you as an employee of this company.
- Over-communicate – If there’s ever a question of whether or not someone knows something they need to know in order to do what they need to do, speak up. Even if you think they do know, speak up. Nothing good happens by keeping information to yourself.
- Don’t put me in the position to have to do your work – I’ve hired you to be the owner of what you do. However, because I over-index on taking ownership of what we do for our customers, I will step in where required, if you’re not delivering. Historically, team members have used this as a crutch thinking in some form “if I don’t do it, Mike will take care of it.” Don’t make this mistake. Take ownership of your work and your deadlines. Don’t look to me as a resource to bail you out.
- Don’t let me be the expert at what you do – You’re here to be our resident expert at whatever it is that you do. Even if there are multiple people with your title, you should strive to be the best possible one on our team. Having many people with deep knowledge in their specific areas make our organization stronger. The more often that you are highlighting nuances of what your work is in ways that I can’t, the better off we all are. If the opposite is true and I continue to know more about what you do than you do, we are limited by my ability to stay on top of that and the myriad other things that I am responsible for.
Take your continued learning seriously and always look for opportunities to innovate on our approach.
- We are a small business, not a startup – Due to our size it’s easy to conflate our organization with a startup. We’re not a company that went out and convinced an investor to give us millions of dollars to create a spin on something else that exists.
We are a bootstrapped company that was built through self-investment. We’re here to do great work that gets results for our clients, not to play ping pong and seek the next round of funding.
That is not to say that we don’t have fun, because we should and we do. However, this is not about celebrating bloated valuations and growing just for the purposes of “growth.” This is about doing strong creative and performant work that creates a long lasting business.
- Anticipate one another’s needs – We are a team. Teams work best when they understand the needs of the people around them. If everyone has your back, you have less to worry about and you’re able to take risks and do better work. Always think about the needs of the people around you and how you can help them achieve their objectives.
- Be reliable - Do what you say you will. We don’t have anything if we don’t have follow through.
- Be your own project manager – Project management is everyone’s responsibility. Take ownership of updating your tasks, tracking your time and providing the information for everything to work seamlessly across our team.
- Bring me business cases, not your wishlist – I, too, would love to always be using the new hot thing all the time. However, we’re a business with a series of goals and resource constraints. If you want a resource, bring a business case and if it makes sense we’ll shift things around to support it. We won’t invest in something just because you want it.
This entire document represents my expectations, but I hope this section adds color and helps you understand what makes me tick. Feel free to ask for clarification on anything I’ve said here. It’s not meant to turn you off to the prospect of working with me, rather it’s to clarify what I’m thinking throughout the course of our interactions.