Why Your Team Is Your First Product
This month, we kicked off programming at Facebook’s Startup Garage at Station F. The program’s goal is to help 12 local startups accelerate their businesses through dedicated mentorship, access to Facebook engineering and product experts, and working space at Station F.
A core component of the 6-month program is the Startup Garage Speaker Series, where experts from Facebook and across the tech industry host interactive workshops on topics throughout the startup development lifecycle.
To kick things off, Fiona Mullan, who focuses on building and maintaining Facebook’s culture, led over 100 attendees through a workshop on building effective teams and company culture.
Her main message: Your team is your most important product. It’s imperative to your businesses’ growth to bring the skillsets into your company that will challenge your thinking and fill in your skill gaps.
So how do you start?
Building a team is two-part: First, it’s about finding the right people, and second, it’s about creating a work experience that they enjoy contributing to. Here are Fiona’s tips on how to build and retain a great team, with a few examples from her experience building teams at Facebook.
Finding the right people
1. Declare a mission
Identify what your business is trying to achieve at the highest level and answer the question “what is my business’ place in the world?” It should be aspirational, seem unachievable and be ever-developing as the world and your business evolves. Aligning your company around a shared purpose is essential to ensuring your team and product development process is as objective as possible. For example, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. It’s a social mission that defines and attracts the people aligned with the products Facebook builds.
2. Define and practice values
Define and align on what people at your company should be doing when no one is looking. These values should emerge organically from your mission, and be shared by everyone, existing and new, on your team. Having these clearly spelled out will help your employees understand the working styles and behaviors that will make them successful at your company.
Some examples at Facebook are: “move fast,” “be bold,” “be open,” and “nothing at Facebook is somebody else’s problem.” Mark and Sheryl developed these values overtime, taking into account what matters to them and what’s relevant to the company in the world.
3. Practice what you preach
Ensure that the culture (defined by the mission and the values), present in the daily life of the company. And while it’s often easier said than done, hold people accountable for aligning their work with the company mission. One way to get ahead of this is to hire people that have shown in previous roles that they already operate in a way that reflects your values.
Facebook tries to keep its values top-of-mind with employees by printing posters of its mission in every office globally, and rewarding actions and work styles in line with company values during performance reviews.
Creating a personal work experience
1. Know what drives people
Spend time to understand what motivates your team, and create the incentives that will drive them to perform at their best. Studies show that money can be less effective than other factors, so don’t ignore key motivators such as:
- Ensuring people are doing work that is personalized and fulfilling
- Defining clear growth opportunities while ensuring individual impact is recognized at the company level
- Giving people the opportunity to share what matters to them, and create teams that align with these incentives.
Facebook surveys all employees semi-annually about these basic questions (e.g. do you feel your work is impactful, do you feel you are progressing in your career). Managers are then calibrated on their team’s responses. Survey results are then monitored over time to ensure that appropriate changes can be made to enable employees to do their best work.
2. Design the work experience
Invest in making the work experience at your company feel personal. This means thinking through the first day of being an employee, the first month, the first 3 months and so on. In an initial and uniform onboarding, clearly layout your expectations, establish how your plan to celebrate people and give people visibility into what you as a leader are thinking and planning.
Some of the ways Facebook invests in the personal experience are:
- A robust technical and cultural onboarding
- A hand-written note before your first day and traditions like “Faceversaries” to celebrate yearly tenure
- All-Hands meetings to look back and look ahead at the company’s progress.
3. Invest in good managers
Identify people whose primary job is to care about the humans and human experience on each team. Loyal people are invested in the success of their company, and studies show that loyalty is a link between one person and another: people leave managers, not companies. Some best practices for good managers are:
- Ask and give frequent feedback
- Demonstrate care about humans
- Celebrate people
- Set clear expectations
- Hold people accountable
- Provide growth opportunities.
Facebook tries to give manager roles to the people who will do them well by defining two distinct career paths within the company: a path for individual contributors and a path for managers. Because not everyone wants to be a people manager, there are clear paths for success for both managers and non-managers.
From Fiona:
“Facebook was once a startup, so hopefully some of these tips will be helpful for you [entrepreneurs] as you think about your organizations.” In her three years at Facebook, Fiona managed the company culture in EMEA as the company went from 7,000 to over 20,000 employees.
Fiona’s perspective, along with the others in our speakers series, are just some of the pieces of the Startup Garage programming. Facebook itself emerged from a startup ecosystem, and with Startup Garage, our goal is to share this knowledge and experience with the next generation of startups in France. Stay tuned for more of the ideas and experiences coming out of the program right here on Medium and on our Facebook Page.
