Celebrate Individuality

Q. What are some of the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?A. After college, a roommate and I started a company called LinkExchange in 1996, and it grew canada goose clearance to about 100 or so people, and then we ended up selling the company to Microsoft in 1998. From the outside, it looked like it was a great acquisition, $265 million, but most people don’t know the real reason why we ended up selling Canada Goose Coats On Sale the company.It was because the company culture just went completely downhill. When it was starting out, when it was just 5 or 10 of us, it canada goose factory sale was like your typical dot com. We were all really excited, working around the clock, sleeping under our desks, had no canada goose clearance sale idea what day of the week it was. But we canada goose didn’t know any better and didn’t pay attention to company culture.By the time we got to 100 people, even though we hired people with the right skill sets and experiences, I canada goose outlet just dreaded getting out of bed in the morning and was hitting that snooze button over and over again.Financially, it meant I didn’t have to work again if I didn’t want to. So that was the uk canada goose outlet lens through which I was looking at things. It’s basically asking the question, what would you want to do if you won the lottery? For me, I didn’t want to be part of a company where I dreaded going into the office.So when I joined Zappos about a year Canada Goose Outlet later, I wanted to make sure that canada goose uk black friday I didn’t make the same mistake that I cheap Canada Goose had made at LinkExchange, in terms of the company culture going downhill. canada goose uk shop So for us, at Zappos, we really view culture as our No. 1 priority. canada goose coats on sale We decided that if we get the culture right, most of the stuff, like building a brand around delivering the very best customer Canada Goose Jackets service, will just take care of itself.Q. So how do you do that?A. About five years ago, we formalized the definition of our culture into 10 core values. We wanted to come up with committable core values, meaning that we would actually be willing to hire and fire people based on those values, regardless of their individual job performance. Given that criteria, it’s actually pretty tough to come up with core values.Q. Tell me what happened.A. We spent a year doing that. I basically sent an e mail out to the entire company, asking them what our values should be, and got a whole bunch of different responses. The initial list was actually 37 long, and then we ended up condensing and combining them and went back and forth and came up with our list of 10.Today, we actually do two separate sets of interviews. The hiring manager and his or her team will interview canada goose uk outlet for the standard fit within the team, relevant experience, technical canada goose coats ability and so on. department does a separate set of interviews purely for culture fit. They actually have questions for each and buy canada goose jacket cheap every one of the buy canada goose jacket core values.Q. Can you give me an example of the value and the question?A. Well, some of them are behavioral questions. One of our values is, cheap canada goose uk “Create fun and a little weirdness.” So one of our www.canadagooseuk.net interview questions is, literally, on canada goose black friday sale a scale of 1 to 10, how weird are you? If you’re a 1, you’re probably a little bit too strait laced for us. If you’re a 10, you might be too psychotic for us.It’s not so much the number; it’s more seeing how candidates react to a question. Because our whole belief is that everyone is a little weird somehow, so it’s really more just a fun way of saying uk canada goose that we really recognize and celebrate each person’s individuality, and we want their true personalities to shine in the workplace environment, whether it’s with co workers or when talking with customers. Yee/The New York TimesQ. Did the process of developing those core values go smoothly?A. Honestly, there was a lot of resistance to the core values rolling out, including from me. I was very hesitant, because it just felt like one of those big company things to do. But within a couple of months, it just made such a huge difference. It gave everyone a common language, and just created a lot more alignment in terms of how everyone in the company was thinking. If I canadian goose jacket could do it all over again, I would roll out our core values from Day 1.Q. What other things did you do at Zappos to sort of reinforce and build the culture?A. Probably the Canada Goose sale most important thing I did was try to Canada Goose online encourage employees to come up with their own ideas for building the culture. The actual ideas that I’ve personally come up with are few and far between.Newsletter Sign UpContinue reading the main storyQ. But what were those?A. For example, for our offices in Las Vegas, it’s a big building. We’ve probably got 700 employees in Vegas. The previous tenants had canada goose store multiple doors where you can exit, and the parking lot is in the back. We made the decision to actually lock all the doors so everyone has to go through the front entrance reception area, even though that means you might have to walk all the way around the building. The reason for that is to create this kind of central hub that everyone has to pass through to help build community and culture.And the free lunch we provide for employees is really meant less as a benefit in terms of a free lunch, and more to get employees to interact with each other. But most of the stuff that happens in our office is really about some employee coming up with an idea and, whether it’s me or other managers, saying, “If you’re passionate about it, just run with it.”At some point, it Canada Goose Online kind of just snowballs, because once employees see other employees just doing stuff, Canada Goose Parka then that lets them feel like they have more permission to run with their ideas.

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