Kindly aggressive might just be a superpower
Aggression has got a bad rep. We instantly think about a big bad person that tries to dominate others, yells, and if you don’t watch out will psychically hurt you. However, there is another side of aggression that actually might be useful to almost all of us.
Aggression relates to assertiveness, which connects to how agreeable you are. The more agreeable you are with others and yourself, the more likely you are going to end up in situations that you don’t want to be. What if instead of seeing aggression as this big bad bully, we can use it as fuel to improve ourselves, our lives and the people we work and play with?
How we got to being kindly aggressive
Instead of running our business on processes and policies, we use principles instead. They make it incredibly clear how we want everyone to act. With the purpose not to just do more, but to be more. They guide us to build trust, share useful advice, improve our decision making, and very important they guide us to remember how to have fun and reward each other. Because we want to build a world that doesn’t exist yet. A world in which 99% of the people can go home every day feeling they truly understand each other and knowing they created work that matters, we have to rethink the way we lead and manage teams. Including our own. That’s why decided to sharpen our own principles to help us solve more interesting problems faster, better, together. Because we know we could do better, we did.
It’s important to know that principles are not like “cultural values”. The reality is that most cultural values (and with most I mean >95% of them), are falling short to be useful enough to add value by replacing unnecessary bureaucracy (your processes, policies, and rules). Instead, they are just another thing that nobody is really held accountable to. Often because they are so vaguely defined that it’s not clear what behaviors and actions you want to see in your culture.
Merely saying you value trust, integrity, and transparency is easy. The real challenge is to define the behaviors that are non-negotiable that make it clear how you hire, promote and fire people. Yes, fire people. I know it’s not a comfortable topic. It’s not even comfortable inside Blindfeed to talk about it. However, as we defined our principles as a team (we will share soon how to do this yourself), we made it very clear everybody understood that this is not some culture “thing” to make us temporary feel good. These are the principles we want to hold ourselves and each other accountable to.
Sharpening our principles
Before we went into defining the behaviors, and with that the principles, we asked ourselves the question… What makes Blindfeed special? And one think totally stood out for us (which we discovered via a silent voting exercise), that what makes us special is that we are kindly aggressive. At first, I was a bit shocked as I never really felt aggression in the office, nobody ever acts fearful, we are tightly aligned and people are empowered to make their own decisions. However, when we discussed it, nobody saw being kindly aggressive as a negative, everybody saw it as a superpower. They said that because we call out bullshit, have incredibly high standards and help each other out no matter what, we have a special ingredient you don’t find easily in a company.
After hearing what people thought, I still had to digest it a bit. Especially as it’s often a very thin line you’re walking on. I knew from my past experience of being highly competitive mixed with a highly ambitious drive often lead me to make the mistake to have the same high expectations of others. And in the past, I disliked people who fell short of the standard I held myself to. This is, of course, a mistake, as you’ll rub a lot of people the wrong way. However, there isn’t to say we should all be just NICE to each other all the time. Being nice is an enabler of mediocrity when you don’t push each other to be the best they can be. Then, you are just being superficial, ambiguous and inauthentic. The perfect ingredients for political warfare. When people aren’t able to put their honest thought on the table, they will have to vent elsewhere. And venting never really helps in the long-term. This is why at Blindfeed we often say to each other when asking for someone’s advice or perspective “Please don’t be nice, be helpful.”
In order to really define the behaviors that we believe are helpful in building trust, give useful advice, make better decisions and have fun, we had to dig deeper than just being Kindly Aggressive. Below you can see how we’ve defined the behaviors of our principle ‘kindly aggressive’ (one out of 10).
Kindly aggressive means
- You complain by creating better work.
- You don’t put things off till tomorrow when you can get it done today.
- You kindly push people not to just do more but to be more.
- You always do what’s in the best interest Blindfeed and its users, even when it creates friction.
- You take initiative when you see someone is struggling.
Our principles also make it clear what we devalue
- Complaining about other people or decisions to other people (recipe for political warfare).
- Stalling tasks till tomorrow instead of going through the discomfort to ship your work and learn from the results.
- Yelling or raising your voice at people instead of controlling yourself and trying to be useful.
- Not speaking up when you disagree and later fail to commit even though it’s in the best interest of Blindfeed and our users.
- Letting someone drown instead of helping them.
We use our principles by reflecting on them continuously. After important meetings where we brainstorm or make decisions, end of the week reflection and for our 1:1 check-ins.
The principles benefit us by
- Minimizing time spent in discussions (including meetings and Slack) as we have crystal clear shared principles.
- Empowering everyone to make better decisions and having control of their work.
- Building an incredibly high level of trust in the team.
- And most important of all. Leave space for magic.
Our principles help us go home at the end of the day feeling we understand each other, and know we created work that matters.
We know it’s not easy, but easy never changed anything.
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