My top takeaways from our first company retreat for Leverage
No matter who you are, you’re limited to 24 hours in the day.
What’s different about the trailblazers, the game-changers, the paradigm-shifters — they’re high-efficiency people. The kind of people who accomplish more in a day than most accomplish in a week. These are the type of people in our client community — but equally, on our team.
What’s different about the trailblazers, the game-changers, the paradigm-shifters — they’re high-efficiency people.
Ours is a business of innovation in time and resource management. A company where efficiency is more than our unique talent — it’s what drives us, keeps us curious and is our catalyst for continual improvement.
We are trained by the best and that gives us an edge — we are a team of tech-loving, client-centric, task-hungry professionals committed to lean-in, learn fast, and constantly seek long-term solutions, not short-term fixes. We’re unique individuals coming together to form a global, virtual community with different talents and time-zones.
We succeed because we take pride-in — and ownership-of — everything we do. That builds our clients’ trust. We win because we don’t simply “do” — we learn new ways, challenge convention and push expectations.
The framework of the Leverage Project Managers is to optimize, automate, and outsource everything in your life and we are offering a unique opportunity to work with some of the top entrepreneurs around the world to support them in the work they are doing.
We are a new way of getting things DONE.
Leverage started with just two assistants and ten clients in August 2015. By the dawn of the new year in 2017, we had over 100 people on the team, spanning 16 time zones and serving over 450 clients. We’ve been growing extremely quickly and it’s been a wild ride. Leverage doesn’t have an office, nor do we have a single employee. Everyone who works for us is an independent contractor who can choose to work where they want, when they want, and on what they want. The amazing thing about our group of professionals, is that there is nothing compelling them to act as a member of team. What I mean is, employees are duty bound to be team players, to interact with coworkers, and “report” to their bosses, and yet we have one of the strongest team cultures I have ever seen.
Our people support each other, they jump in to help when needed, gladly giving up time they could be billing for, to help out a new teammate with a question, or saving another team mate who got overwhelmed with work. They give of themselves to people, they have never, and may never meet in person. They care about the image of our company and the high quality of service that we deliver to our clients. In short, they give a shit, even though they don’t have to.
We felt we had to bring together the team in person, to see what magic would come of it. So we got roughly a quarter of the team together for a weekend. With over 100,000 miles of collective distance travelled (including those from New Zealand (Team Marmite) and Australia (Team Vegemite), we rented two 15 passenger vans and drove up to The Inn at Shaker Mills in Canaan, NY. We worked out together, ran brainstorming and feedback sessions, competed in challenges, laughed, cried, and grew. These were my biggest takeaways from the weekend and how they might apply to your team.
When you have a culture of iteration, everything is faster in person — we work over Slack and video conference over Zoom. We “see” each other all the time and when someone comes up with a company altering idea on a call, it’s usually begun implementation before the sun goes down that night. We pride ourselves on moving fast and experimenting with every potentially great idea. As good as our ability to communicate asynchronously and via video is, doing it in person is simply faster. We did an exercise called Ritual Dissent whereby we broke up into groups of five. Then one person in each group had one minute to pitch an idea to improve the company. That minute was followed by two minutes of feedback from the other four people in that group. The tweaks were that the feedback could only be negative and the person giving the pitch had to wear a mask to depersonalize the feedback. At the end of the two minutes, the person with the idea rotated to the next group. Once they had pitched and refined their idea through all six groups they pitched their idea to my partner and I. The results were astounding. Thirty people were given the chance to pitch ideas to us after having gone through five iterations of only negative feedback and the results were clear. We got eleven game changing ideas from the team that we’ve already implemented with massive impact.
Many of the tough conversations will not happen remotely, but they still need to happen — when you’re talking to people via video conferencing, you can still cause pain and stress but at the end the person on the receiving end has the ability to turn off their camera, get up from their living room couch, and go to their kitchen and stress eat a gallon of ice cream if they so choose. When you’re in person, there’s no escape, and that’s a good thing because being uncomfortable makes us grow. Once we had finished the ritual dissent exercise I decided to “turn the camera on me.” I put on the mask and sat in front of all thirty members of the team that were there and said “Take the next five minutes and only give me negative feedback, no hold barred, no consequences” It was really scary, and that’s what made it so impactful. The best piece of feedback I got was that I needed to spend more time teaching people instead of simply providing them with the answer. It was actionable feedback that I hadn’t received before.
For a remote team to work, it has to feel like a family — there’s plenty of research that shows people want to have an impact in their work. They want to feel like they are adding value to the world and creating connections with other people that enrich both their lives. The traditional workplace doesn’t fulfill that basic human need. It doesn’t make people feel autonomous, committed, challenged, effective, or uncomfortable. You don’t typically get these from work, you get them from family. It may sound simple but when working with remote teams, you are no longer bound by a physical space, so you need to be bound by an unbreakable commitment to each other, and the great mission of the team. There is real love among members of our team. The support, the guidance, and the care that I see in the people that I get to work with everyday motivates me and drives me to never let them down and to always push for the best.
Leverage creates opportunities to have a true work life integration where no want is sacrificed and no regrets are provided.
