Resources
Episode Transcript
Lisa: So Anabel, maybe if you could start by saying something about how you came to work at Nearsoft and what challenges you were brought in to help with?
Anabel: Yeah, of course. Well, when I first learned about Nearsoft, I was working here in Hermosillo, which is a city in the northern part of Mexico. We’re close to the border with the US. And my husband was at that time working in another software company here in the city, and we heard about this weird company that had like a very different kind of culture that was very focused on people instead of like maybe traditional organizations where everything is designed around efficiency and making a better business.
In general, the first time I heard about this, I don’t know, I thought that it couldn’t be true. Like it sounded too good to be true. But then destiny happened and my husband and I ended up working here. He is a software designer, and by seeing his experience here, I could see very closely how this very honest intention translated into practice here at Nearsoft.
At the time, they were a very small organization. They were around 50 to 60 people maybe, and everything seemed so organic. Like they could practice this, they could put into practice this honest intention they have in investing in people very easily because they were a small group of people. They were all located in the same office and they all knew each other. And whenever they needed to, I don’t know, learn about something or discuss a solution for something as a group, they could do it very easily.
Also, things like feedback and accountability all came so naturally because they were a very close-knit group of people who were honestly interested in each other. So this was very, I would say, natural. That’s the best word to describe it, I think.
But then when they got to a point where they were more than 100 people, they started realizing that they needed to be a little bit more intentional in the way they followed some processes. And people started asking for this. Like for example, they wanted to develop their own evaluation process for people so they could get feedback from their peers in order to improve and, I don’t know, train themselves or grow within the company.
But at the beginning it was very difficult since they didn’t have a team of people dedicated to creating these processes or like maybe formalizing the processes a little bit so that they could happen in a predictable way. So they had this idea, like the founders of the company had this idea that they didn’t want to have an HR department, at least not a traditional HR department.
And the first reason was because they didn’t want to separate the people stuff from the people. Like they didn’t want to assign a person or a team to do this stuff and then send a message to the rest of the people that this is no longer something that you do, this is something like this specialized group of people does. And they told me that they didn’t want that, but they knew they had these challenges coming with the growth of the company where they would be needing something like HR. That’s what they told me at the beginning, but not quite like that.
Especially like, well, the traditional concept of HR that sees people as resources and like a means for something instead of people as an essential part of the organization. Like they make the organization and they build the culture. It’s that culture is not something that is passed to them, it’s something that they build together.
All that, we had these discussions at the beginning, and it was to be honest a little confusing because it wasn’t like a predefined role that I came to fill. It was more like a set of challenges. And well, the approach we used to talk of them was first we did this like diagnostics of what was going on with people and what people saw as the challenges that they were already facing and the ones that were coming in the future with growth.
And that’s when we came up with a proposal for a different approach, like something like HR but not quite, and we call this project at the beginning the People Development Project because we wanted to make it all about people’s experience and people’s interests in order to help them grow within the company.
Lisa: So when you say you put together a proposal for the people development project, who then reviewed the proposal?
Anabel: Well, there was a team of people who were interested in, I would say, like making sure that this was what we needed, not what we didn’t need or we didn’t want. This group of people was mostly from the operations team here at the company, and there was also the CEO and the CTO. They were part of this team.
So I consulted a lot of people. Like I did, I don’t know, I don’t remember how many, but I did a lot of interviews. Some were like individual interviews with people and others were like some sort of focus groups with different kinds of people in the organization. We had workshops. Well, I needed to really understand to come up with a simple solution that was the product of collective reflection about the challenges that were coming for people.
So this wasn’t something that just, I don’t know, one person or this very specific group of people had to approve, but it was something that was very important that made sense for everyone and for the culture that was already in place in the company. Like I was very worried that this wouldn’t feel like something that was being imposed to people or that they were being obligated to do.
And we had, like in the following years, we had to do a lot of experiments and get a lot of feedback from people and correct many things, improve many things, especially the way we wanted to design the processes. Because when we were doing something that is so different from traditional approaches, it’s very difficult to find references out there.
Like for example, the 360 assessment process. Like I know this is something that is used by many organizations, but they do it in a very different way. And we couldn’t just copy something just like that and tell people, okay, this is the way things are going to be done now. We needed to make this something that they agreed upon, like everyone agreed upon, not because they had to, but because it made sense to them and it was useful for them.
Lisa: So over the years as you’ve been running these different experiments, and also I know one of your challenges was to grow Nearsoft without losing the culture. And also self-management can, as you say, be a lot easier when you’re a small company, but when you’re nearly 300 people as you are now, it takes more intentionality to create a self-management culture. So what have been some of the main lessons you’ve learned as you’ve been running these experiments?
Anabel: I think one of the most basic and important things for a company to keep their culture while growing is staying true to their shared values. I think that’s the most important one because when everyone is clear what their shared values as a company are, they are going to find the way. Like it’s just, it’s easier to find solutions and it’s easier to experiment and have a guide that tells you if the result you’re getting is aligned with the values or not.
So I think that that has been very, very important for us. Like in 2010 or 2011, we had this workshop where there were around 100 people at the time. We were together a whole day as an organization to come up with what we were going to define as our values in the company. So the values weren’t designed by, I don’t know, the CEO on his desk or something that he imagined would be good for the company. They came up from this very participative exercise where everyone talked about what was valuable for them as individuals and what they thought would be valuable, would be like a shared value or should be a shared value in the company.
And we came up with the definition of our current five values that haven’t changed since they were first defined because they kept being like constantly reinforced. So every decision we have made since then, we’ve thought about the values. Like, okay, so remember that our values are teamwork, something that we call “be smart and get things done,” which is like a practical approach to things, leadership, commitment, and long-term relationships.
And whenever we faced a difficult decision, we would remember this. Like, okay, we could do A, B, or C. So is A aligned with our values? Is it the kind of thing that is going to reinforce our values or not? I think that that has been fundamental and especially that the values are shared and known by everyone. And that we use them a lot, we talk about them a lot in every one of our processes from the onboarding to the 360 assessments, feedback processes. Like we’re constantly recognizing people using our values or five shared values, and that helps a lot to create this culture where people have the same framework to make decisions. So that’s one thing.
And the other one, I think, is we have or organizations have to promote people’s constant participation in order for them to feel a part of the decision-making processes. Because this is not just to make the best decision, it’s also for people to start adopting the new decision or the new way of doing things that comes from this process since the beginning of the process. So it is very, very important for people to be a part of everything.
Now, when we talk about this, a lot of people hear or understand that we need to ask people about everything and we need people to vote for every single decision that we make. But that’s not the case. We have very different ways for people to participate. And in order for them to feel, I don’t know, maybe empowered to participate, they need to have access to our information. Like information has to be very transparent.
So we have our All Hands meeting every month, for example, where we share everything we have done in the past month. We share financial information, our results, what we struggle with, the decisions we made. We have to explain them and answer questions from people. We also have our team-building weeks which happen twice a year, and during these weeks we all get together in the same city. We have here in Mexico three different locations in three different cities in the country. So twice a year we get together for a whole week, and during this week we do a lot of activities, like group activities to talk about stuff that concerns us all as a company.
We’re constantly doing surveys to get feedback from people. It just happens very naturally. We, like, whenever there’s a decision to be made, people raise their hands and ask questions. We might write a document with an explanation for a proposal and send it to everyone, and then people would just add comments and questions to the document. And if we see people are struggling with understanding something or are like strongly against a decision we want to make, then we find different ways of approaching people.
So that is something that’s always on in our minds. Like we cannot make decisions that are going to impact everybody alone. So we find ways of making people participate.
And another way that we have been able to grow our culture with the growth of our company is by learning from other organizations. I think that has been also very important. We are currently part of different networks of organizations that are trying new things or new ways of doing things like us. And that has helped us like a lot because we learn about their practices, we experiment with them, we come up with our own version of things, and we talk about our struggles with everyone.
And that helps us, well, sometimes not make the same mistakes as other organizations and learn from their mistakes, but also to process our own mistakes. And by sharing what we do, there has to be this understanding of the issue first or the struggle that you went through first. So that has given us like very good tools to escalate culture in our organization.
And well, finally is, as I was saying, experimentation. Like we have to keep experimenting and the only bad thing that could happen with this is that we stopped experimenting. Like if we thought that we have come to a place where, I don’t know, we have defined, for example, a process that we think works very well and that’s it, then we close ourselves to feedback and we say, okay, this is the way things are now in this process. Very bad because since change happens all the time, things are going to be outdated very fast also. So we need to keep moving.
And we have processes that have been, that are in a more mature phase right now, but we still experiment with them. We change a few things, we see, we ask for people’s feedback, we try like radically different approaches for things with small groups, and then we see the response. We’re constantly doing this also. So I think that those are like the main strategies we’ve used to escalate our culture with growth.
Lisa: You’ve talked a lot about processes, and it sounds like you have a very thorough recruitment and onboarding process which helps recruit the kinds of people who have the same shared values or helps them with an understanding of what is important at Nearsoft. Do you also train people in – and I’m trying to stop calling them soft skills and I’m trying instead to call them human skills – but do you train people in skills like, for instance, how to give one another feedback? Because in self-management, it seems to me that there are different ways of being as well as the kind of doing structures, processes that become important in order for us to work successfully together where everyone is essentially a leader.
Anabel: Yes, yeah, I agree totally. I also agree with the human skills concept instead of soft skills, especially in the engineering world. I think people associate hard skills with the technical stuff and then soft skills with all the other stuff. And when we call them human skills, it’s like you put them in a different level, I think, because you cannot avoid human skills or developing human skills.
And about feedback, yes, it’s very, very, very important having a feedback culture and helping people develop the skills to make the most out of this kind of culture for themselves, for their teams, and for the company. It’s fundamental. I think it’s one of the main things that we do here at Nearsoft as the people development team. We invest a lot in the skills that people develop to give each other feedback and to process this feedback and to turn it into an input for their learning process, for their growth process in general.
For a self-managed team or company, this ability to provide feedback has everything to do with making our culture sustainable also. It helps people improve their ownership of their own learning process and create an accountability culture within the team also.
So like in a traditional organization, people grow by climbing the corporate ladder. In a horizontal organization, that direction is not that important. What matters is that you are incrementing your impact or the impact of what you do. So you can learn how to do that by having information about the results of your current behavior. And the only way to have that information is for people around you to tell you how they see you.
So we do have these very specific right indicators if people are doing their jobs or not, but that’s not everything. There is, like, most of the things we can improve, we see them when we understand how other people see us. In traditional organizations, if this happens once a year when the manager tells the person, like gives feedback to the employee about what the manager sees, like what he perceives in the person. So this is always, there’s always a subjective component of the feedback processes.
And what we do by naming and identifying this subjective element is we realize that since there is this subjective perception of you, you don’t have to take what people around you tell you as the truth about you. It’s just information that will help you make intelligent decisions about yourself and about your own growth or the way you can improve your impact in the company.
So we start this education process of the skills needed for our feedback culture during the onboarding of new people at Nearsoft. We have a class that is sort of like a workshop that we call the Art of Feedback. I teach that class myself, and we have been teaching this class for the past two years and improving it with people’s feedback, by the way.
And what we teach here is we help people understand how important this is for our culture and to sustain our culture. And we help them also identify the importance of managing our own emotions or the emotional process that comes with dealing with feedback. Especially since in this industry, or I don’t know, maybe specifically with engineers, most of them haven’t been interested in the past in these kinds of topics. It’s like something very strange for them sometimes. Like, “Oh, so we’re coming here and we’re suddenly talking about feelings and all that stuff.”
But then the main objective of this class is for them to understand that they have been dealing with feelings in the past, especially when they, for example, avoid giving feedback because they don’t want to feel bad or make the other person feel bad. So they subconsciously just make things worse by avoiding facing a difficult conversation that you have to have with someone.
And we start talking about that, about how it feels, about how it is okay for it to feel awkward or to not feel good at all having to tell your teammate who is also your friend that he’s not doing well, or that if he continues doing the things he’s doing, he might be fired from the team. Those are difficult conversations that in traditional organizations usually are part of what a manager or a boss does, not teammates.
So most of the people that come to Nearsoft are used to that. Like if I have a problem with a teammate or I see that someone is struggling with something, I give feedback to the person, and if he doesn’t respond well, I just go to the boss and I tell him, and now that’s his problem. That’s not my problem anymore.
So during the onboarding process, we have to make sure that people understand that this is not someone else’s problem. This is your problem too. It’s your responsibility as a teammate to help each other grow. You know, we talk a lot, a lot during this phase of their onboarding about this Ubuntu idea of growth where everyone is co-responsible for everyone’s growth. I really love this phrase that they use a lot within the WorldBlu community that translates Ubuntu: “I’m at my best when you are at your best.”
So we teach people during onboarding that you cannot be at your best if your teammates are not at their best. So there is no individual success without collective success within your team. So if you see right now that this is going to be difficult for you, please tell us, we are going to help you. Then we, the people development team, we have been trained in what we call coaching skills, and we have a coaching program where if we identify individuals who struggle with these kinds of things, we work with them individually in a long-term program.
Lisa: Wow, that sounds fantastic. Like you’re really, there’s a real coaching culture. So finally, what advice would you give other organizations who are interested in self-managing teams or being a self-managing organization from what you’ve learned as a people development team?
Anabel: Well, first, there is no one single path for every organization. You have to be at peace with this idea of uncertainty, and you have to be very, very open to experimentation, to learn from others. You have to create as an organization a shared methodology for learning. Everyone has to be on board with this. There have to be explicit agreements about how to make decisions, for example. How do we say that something is not working? Who has the last word about different kinds of decisions?
Like, for example, we learned about this practice from another organization in the WorldBlu community, which are the leadership teams and the way they make decisions based on what they called back then a decision matrix, where they define the different kinds of decisions that people could make in the organization, and who needed to be consulted in every kind of decision, who could be a part of the discussion of that decision, and who had like the last word. Like who could participate in actually making the decision, like the final decision.
And we adopted this and we experimented with it and we did some adjustments. And right now we have a similar matrix where people can clearly see that, for example, we as part of, as employees, as part of the company, we have a saying, and we can give our opinion about stuff like our business model, for example, but we don’t have the final decision. That would be like maybe the board or the founders or the partners. They would have the final decision in those kinds of topics.
But in like, for example, in this decision matrix, we have that everything that has to do with employees’ benefits, we all have to be consulted and we have to come to an agreement all together because this is something that impacts everyone and it’s about us.
So in the past, we have had people creating leadership teams to make decisions about, like once we had a leadership team make a decision about the annual bonus that we get in December, the way it was being distributed to people. There was this group of people who didn’t like the way things were being done, so they created a proposal. And at the end, they came up with a new way of doing things and we did it. It was something that came from the people.
But I say this as an example of how establishing a clear path or a shared methodology for people to make decisions helps a lot when you want to say what works and what doesn’t work. Because that also helps empower people to want to be a part of this decision. It’s like, I don’t know, I’ve been in other organizations where top management says, “Oh, we want people to participate,” but they don’t participate. They’re like, “We open the door for them to say things and to propose things, and they just don’t care.”
And I don’t think, I don’t think it is that people don’t care. Like what usually happens is that they’ve had experiences in the past where they wanted to participate and they just weren’t heard, or they were told that what they were proposing, they didn’t have enough information, or it just was, I don’t know, ignored. So because they didn’t have these processes in place for people to be a part of what was going on, they just give up. And I think that’s only human and it’s natural and understandable.
And we don’t want that here. So I think that is fundamental when you’re trying to build a self-management culture to have these processes in place and have reinforcing ways for people to be a part of what’s going on.
