Building Spill: Why we set values in the leadership team

Building Spill is a series of posts about running a small business (we're a team of 14) and the decisions we make along the way. A member of the leadership team will be publishing a post on a recent experience and what we learnt every two weeks or so. Read along and let us know what you think. 

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Introducing the Spill leadership team

We’re a small leadership team at Spill. There’s Calvin, the founder. Robin, Head of Engineering. And me (Anna, VP Operations). We’re also a small company though so it feels about right. There’s only 14 people currently working at Spill which makes the leadership team just over 20% of the total.

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We’re not only a small leadership team but a relatively inexperienced one. All three of us became leaders for the first time at Spill so unfortunately we can’t draw on years of experience sitting back in swivelly chairs with feet on desks and negotiating deals with people in suits. We can at least imagine that these exciting things await us.

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As a result, we often make mistakes. We also learn a lot. We’re hoping that some of the things we learn are valuable to other people leading teams in small businesses and so we’ll be publishing one of these every other week - read along and let us know what you think.

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Arguing on a Monday morning

It’s Monday of this week and we’re in our weekly leadership team meeting. We have it every Monday, it’s called Weekly Stand-up and it’s 1.5 hours long. We use the time to set our priorities for the week and decide where to focus our collective efforts.

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We have, as is often the case, got stuck arguing about where best to focus. We’re trying to make sure the teams are performing well and have quite different solutions for achieving this.

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To characterise a little:

Calvin: “Just spend loads of time hiring the perfect people and everything will be fine.”

Robin: “Focus on making sure all the teams are working in balanced harmony and everything will be fine.”

Me: “Build all the systems and processes you need, make sure they’re working and then everything will be fine.”

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We’re unable to move past this. Calvin wants to focus all his efforts on hiring, Robin wants to craft the perfect team dynamic and I can’t see how either of those things helps if you don’t have the right systems to make the company run. None of us is willing to compromise on their approach. We end the meeting feeling stressed and irritated but, while we are bad at leadership team meetings, we’re good at working on the product together. It’s therefore with some relief that we escape back to designing in Figma, coding authentication methods and doing user interviews.

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This is not the first leadership team meeting that has ended this way. We had an argument the other week because Robin and Calvin were dragging their feet on filling out my lengthy and spreadsheet-based review & development plan for each of their reports. Often we get to an impasse and eventually we just have to end the meeting. We can at least all agree it looks bad to the rest of the company if we’re cancelling our other meetings to continue an argument that’s going nowhere. 

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It has become more important to get our dynamic right though. We are relatively newly formed as a group because Robin joined the leadership team in September of last year, Rachael (Head of Marketing) is on maternity leave and Maria (Head of Product) is leaving. We’re on our own for the next six months and we have to work together more effectively.

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Working with a coach

It’s time to call in back-up. I have just started coaching with someone called James. When I did get my review & development plan from Calvin, one of his suggestions was that I should get a coach. He then helpfully also found me one by messaging a highly competent CEO for recommendations. We could tell she was highly competent because she replied to this LinkedIn message from a stranger in a few minutes and recommended James who is really great.

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I give James an outline of the conversation I had with Calvin and Robin. “We often get quite dysfunctional,” I confess. “How do we fix it?”

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“One way to frame it is that you’re at constant loggerheads and you’ll never be able to work together,” says James. I feel grateful that there are two framings.

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“The other way to frame it is that you have a leadership team with a lot of cognitive diversity. That means you’re definitely going to avoid the trap of group think. You just need to figure how to use that cognitive diversity to your advantage instead of fighting with each other.” So far, I’m liking this framing a lot more.

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So how do we do that?

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“Think of an iceberg,” he says. “There’s a bit above the surface - that’s all the arguing you’re doing, but also how you do the work and the actions you take. Then under the surface is the stuff supporting it - that’s years of baked in values and experiences that make you act the way you do. You haven’t yet taken the time to understand the bit below the surface with each other.”

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Essentially, we each bring something quite different to the table. It’s just that we don’t yet appreciate what the other people are bringing or why they’re bringing it. But if we can spend some time really understanding where we’re each coming from, we’ll be able to take the best bits of our respective approaches.

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Deciding our next steps

It’s Friday and I meet Robin and Calvin for our weekly stand-down (30 minutes to reflect on the week’s progress). We have one meeting room in our office space but the walls are thin so for anything more private we find some semi-public space in Shoreditch. Today we’re in a cobbled corridor near Shoreditch High Street overground, I think the lobby of some kind of shared office space. It has chairs, is quite cold and crucially required no key card to get in.

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I tell them the good news that while it might feel like we keep having stressful meetings where we’re at loggerheads with one another, what we’re actually experiencing is a cognitive diversity so powerful it threatens to destroy us. We all celebrate this win. They agree that we could be harnessing our different ways of thinking much more productively and we put in the time to work on it. 

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Our first action is to have three hours next Monday for a workshop to get to understand each other’s values - and hopefully see what sits in the middle of our Venn diagram when we get all of our strengths working together. This sounds a bit fluffy and I suspect it will likely live or die by how focused we can make the discussion.

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Preparing the meeting

Fortunately James has given me some tips on how to structure this. We discussed using the following format:

(1) Establish shared dissatisfaction - we first need to agree that some things are suboptimal and establish a need for change in how we run Spill. Some example prompts: 

• What does each of us think could be going better at Spill?
• What are the three of us bad at? 

(2) Set out a compelling vision of future - lay out a joint vision of what we are working towards and what we want Spill to look like. Some example prompts:

• What do we want the reputation of Spill to be in a year’s time?
• If we had that reputation, what would it look and feel like to walk around the business?
• If people were desperate to get a job here, why would that be?
• What would we be doing internally if people externally were clamouring to find out our methods? 

(3) Take the first step to realise this vision: understand each other’s values - get to a shared understanding of what is driving each person and the values they hold. Some example prompts:

• Get a list of values (like this one) and each pick out 6 that speak to you. Then narrow it down to the 3 that you cannot do without - the ones you will die on a hill for.
• Discuss why each of you have chosen each of your three values. See if there are any overlaps and where you disagree.

Tip from James: it doesn’t matter if the values are really different. What matters is why you chose them and understanding each other’s reasons.

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(4) Agree which values are important for building Spill - agree which of the values we have shared will be important to building the company we want. Some example prompts: 

• Are there any values other people have shared that you cannot agree with?
• On the values where we disagree, does it matter? If so, why? 
• Which values do we think will have the biggest impact?

(5) End by discussing how we might fail to apply our values - values exercises do get a bad name for being fluffy. I think that’s because people often stop at step (3). We have done that before at Spill and it meant the values didn't affect much change. You want to start thinking about how to put the values into practice and where that might be difficult. Some example prompts:

• What are some places we might feel awkward about applying our values?
• Where will these values feel like a major change for the business?

‍Hopefully off the back of this workshop, we can start running the business with a bit more consistency. We’ll be able to put our shared values into practice instead of fighting against one another’s. We’ll have a better answer on what great work at Spill looks like and how to get there. And we’ll be quicker to understand the root cause when one of us does something that takes the others by surprise. ‍We’re having this conversation next week and we’ll let you know how it goes.