“To create a fantastic work culture, encourage people to embrace mistakes, not fear them” with Brian Powers CEO of PactSafe

Encourage people to embrace mistakes, not fear them. This one is super important in a high growth business like ours, but really should be important in any business. In the absence of a playbook/instruction manual for every role and every skill, the best way to learn of from a mistake — your own, or that of someone else. As long as you learn from them, they should be embraced.

As a part of my series about how leaders can create a “fantastic work culture”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Brian Powers. Brian is the founder and CEO of PactSafe and a licensed attorney. As the CEO of PactSafe, Brian leads the strategic vision of the company’s high-velocity contract acceptance platform. Prior to founding PactSafe, Brian’s law practice focused primarily on representing the transactional needs of tech companies. Brian is a frequent speaker, instructor, and author on topics ranging from clickthrough contract acceptance to privacy-related consent management.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

PactSafe was born out of my past lives as an engineer and corporate attorney. We identified an opportunity to change the way the world accepts contracts..so we set out to build the best team we could around that idea.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?

PactSafe has tripled in size over the past 6 months, which has been quite the adventure. You learn really quickly how important it is to have a strong team, great leadership, and the right culture during times of growth.

Are you working on any exciting projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Our high-velocity acceptance platform is being used by some of the most innovative companies in the world, to further our core mission of saving our customers 1,000,000,000 hours of time currently wasted on cumbersome contract execution. We work with our customers every day to improve the platform and give them back precious time in their day.

Ok, lets jump to the main part of our interview. According to this study cited in Forbes, more than half of the US workforce is unhappy. Why do you think that number is so high?

A lot of that unhappiness stems from leadership voids, something we’ve learned from experience. When leadership isn’t actively engaged with their team members, and the feedback loop lags, people get lost. Its particularly difficult in a fast-paced, high growth startup.

Based on your experience or research, how do you think an unhappy workforce will impact a) company productivity b) company profitability c) and employee health and wellbeing?

An unhappy team creates a pretty vicious cycle where all 3 of those areas are adversely impacted in series. Unhappy team members are never as productive, which inevitably will manifest itself in decreased profits, which in turn puts more pressure on the team to perform productively. It’s a cycle that starts with a culture that breeds unhappiness.

Can you share 5 things that managers and executives should be doing to improve their company work culture? Can you give a personal story or example for each?

Create clear goals and objectives.
Without setting clear goals and objectives, for the business, teams and team members, it is very difficult to encourage high performance, let alone measure performance. Once we were able to roll out a framework for setting better goals that could actually be measured, we began to see immediate improvements in alignment, engagement, and performance. That in all, in turn, improved morale significantly.

Communicate clear expectations and feedback.
Periodic communication about how people are tracking against goals and objectives has been a leading indicator for a happy, high performer for PactSafe. Anytime we lag here, happiness and performance suffers, without fail.

Encourage people to embrace mistakes, not fear them.
This one is super important in a high growth business like PactSafe, but really should be important in any business. In the absence of a playbook/instruction manual for every role and every skill, the best way to learn of from a mistake — your own, or that of someone else. As long as you learn from them, they should be embraced.

Figure out what culture even means for your company.
We are still figuring this out. We refuse to define our culture with a collection of words. Rather, we focus on what we’d like the result to be (a happy, high-performing team) and try to foster some key concepts and pillars to increase the likelihood that we achieve that result.

Whatever culture DOES mean, make trust a key pillar.
Whatever our culture is, it begins and ends with trust. When trust is shared among a team, the rest tends to fall into place.

It’s very nice to suggest ideas, but it seems like we have to “change the culture regarding work culture”. What can we do as a society to make a broader change in the US workforce’s work culture?

I don’t think broader changes are needed. Its pretty simple: pay attention to what’s important to the business, its leadership, and team. Once you figure that out, putting a simple framework in place to foster what’s important should create the right culture.