NICK
FRANCIS | APRIL 15, 2019
In
February I took a month off from work — completely off grid. I asked my
teammates to remove my access to Slack and I stopped checking my email. I was
totally absent from work for the month.
It’s
been eight years since I co-founded Help Scout, and prior to February, I could
count the number of days I spent “off grid” on one hand. Sure, I take
vacations. But even on vacation I spend one or two hours catching up with work
every morning. This time it was different.
The case for taking a sabbatical
Why
now? Why take a month off at all? In my case, there were a bunch of signals
telling me that time off would be positive for me personally, but that it’d
be even better for the company. I’ve been in the weeds for
eight years. It’d be healthy to take myself out of the mix and see what breaks,
see what we learn, and watch my teammates take on more ownership.
Absence
is a great measure of leadership effectiveness.
When
a great leader is absent, the team steps in to fill the gaps without any real
disruption. Maybe that’s why I was nervous to take time off for eight years — I
was afraid to face all of the ways in which I’ve failed as a leader and failed
to set my teammates up for success. But in hindsight, it’s exactly what I
needed to understand my leadership strengths and weaknesses.
I’m so
bullish about sabbaticals and their impact that we’ve formalized the program at
Help Scout so that everyone can participate. Once you’ve been with the company
for five years, you can take a month off. In addition, we’ll give you a $2,500
bonus to make sure you can do something fun while you are away. For every five
years at the company, you get a month off and a bonus. As the company grows, I
hope to move the timeframe down to three years, which feels about right to me.
Personal benefits
I love
the work, but I was tired. The honest truth is that I needed a reboot. The time
off gave me an opportunity to do just that, and it was everything I’d hoped
for. I re-connected with my wife. I took a bunch of long walks with my dog,
Elvis. I went to visit my family. And I went snowboarding for two weeks. By all
measures, the reboot was successful and I felt like I had all-new software. I
was re-energized, armed with new perspectives on life and work.
It’s
been several weeks since I returned to work, but not a day goes by without
reflecting on my sabbatical in some way. I can see the big picture more
clearly. I’m more patient. It’s easier for me to not be involved in a project.
I can take a half day to do some strategic thinking and planning without
getting distracted. Most importantly, I can turn the laptop off or put the
phone down and be more present at home — with full confidence my teammates are
taking great care of the business. What a great feeling.
Impact on the company
The
simple truth that’s clear to me now is that I was gripping the wheel
too tightly. Loosening my grip means learning when to facilitate instead of
own, advise instead of decide, and serve instead of lead.
In
eight years I’ve updated my job description three times. I had a feeling that
it was time to update the job description for a fourth time, and a sabbatical
gave me just the right perspective going into it.
- Role #1 (2011-2015): Talk to
customers, build the product, repeat.
- Role
#2 (2015-2017): Build a team; cultivate core values and a culture people
want to be part of.
- Role
#3 (2017-2019): Craft a long-term vision through which Help Scout
can become a
great business.
I don’t
have a label for Role #4 yet. It’s a work in progress. But I’ve discovered a
few critical skills that I’ll have to develop in the role:
1. Being grease instead of glue
When I
returned to work, my colleague Chris said something that’s still ringing in my
ears. He said it was “eye-opening how several processes historically depended
on you being glue.”
Busted. When
I was offline, I couldn’t hide all of the day-to-day decisions I had been
making. I still wrote email copy. I still approved laptop purchases. I still
pushed pixels around with designers. That’s why I was working a couple hours
per day on previous vacations — because I made myself glue in many areas of the
business, and I didn’t want anyone to notice.
Since I
was making a bunch of tactical decisions every day, it meant my teammates were
conditioned to defer to me instead of make decisions themselves.
The
first note I wrote down when I got back from the sabbatical was, “We take too
long to make decisions.” My teammates seemed indecisive; they were spending too
much time gathering data and consensus. I pointed fingers for a couple days
before realizing it was 100% my fault.
By
being “glue,” I was minimizing the impact my teammates could have in the
business. What I should have been instead was “grease.”
The
best thing about being a CEO is that you can add grease to any process,
project, or initiative. You can make things that are stuck get unstuck, or you
can allocate resources in such a way that things move faster. Grease
facilitates movement when needed, but it typically isn’t necessary for things
to keep moving forward. Things fall apart without glue … but being grease is
what good leaders learn to do.
2. Principles > decisions
I’ve
learned firsthand that making all of the decisions won’t scale, and it can
become toxic for your company.
What will scale
is documenting principles people can use to inform decisions that collectively
align with the company’s values, tone of voice, and commitment to customers.
The
tension that develops as a company grows is that a diverse group of people and
perspectives are supposed to represent a single, consistent voice to the world
and to customers. Most companies solve this the easy way — by layering in
process, procedure, and hierarchy. A byproduct is mistrust and an inability for
people to do their best work due to rigid structure.
A more
thoughtful — but also more difficult — way of approaching the growth of your
company is by guiding decisions with principles instead of structure. Good
organizational principles make it so that your diverse team is
guided towards a consistent way of thinking without being stripped of their
decision-making authority. It’s more difficult because in a 100-person company,
you have 100 decision-makers. However, I think the benefits far outweigh the
downsides. It allows high performers to shine.
A
must-read on this topic is a book by Ray Dalio, appropriately titled Principles. Instead of calling all the
shots in his company, Dalio has refined a set of principles over several
decades, which exist to empower others. He defines a principle as follows:
“Principles
are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you
what you want out of life. They can be applied again and again in similar
situations to help you achieve your goals.”
Principles
shouldn’t be heavy-handed or overly prescriptive. A few that come to mind for
me at Help Scout include:
- Nothing is more important than
maintaining our integrity as a brand.
- Make
sure the work we’re doing reinforces and raises our standards for
excellence.
- Customer
service professionals are our people. Create products and resources that
make them feel more powerful.
As a
minimalist, I’m not a big fan of creating organizational overhead. Principles
feel like unnecessary overhead until they aren’t. When they make people feel
like owners, like they have a mandate to impact the business, principles should
be a welcome addition. It’s a much better approach to the alternatives:
top-down decision making or consensus-based bureaucracy.
3. Closing the loop
Another
thing you have to be intentional about in a company with so many owners and
decision-makers is closing the loop — communicating key decisions with the rest
of the company. Making sure everyone has access to
the same information is already a cornerstone of remote work, but
larger teams require more and more structure to keep their teammates in the
know.
I
recently did some reading on Scott Dorsey, the visionary founder and CEO of
ExactTarget. Scott was CEO from day one through their successful acquisition by
Salesforce for $2.4 billion about 12 years later. One of the most powerful
tactics that he implemented in his time there is fondly known as the “Friday
Note.” Here’s how Scott describes it:
“I started
officially sending out my ‘Friday Note’ in 2009 and never missed a weekly email
for over five and a half years. It was a simple and very impactful way to
highlight accomplishments for the week and keep the lines of communication open
with our 2,000+ employees. It showcased the transparency in the company and
helped us keep our unique ‘Orange’ culture as we scaled the company — one of
the defining factors to our overall success at ExactTarget.”
Our
CMO, Justine Jordan, worked for Scott at ExactTarget early in her career and
raves about how this seemingly simple tactic had a profound impact on people in
the company. It was so profound in fact, that when Scott left the company, the
employees compiled all of his Friday notes into a book and gave everyone a copy.
I’ve
started experimenting with writing Friday Notes at Help Scout. I don’t know if
I’ll keep it up for over five years, but I’m convinced that a high volume of
passive communication in a growing company connects people. It
connects them to each other, to the mission, and to a vision they feel
responsible for.
I’m
eager to experiment with new ways for our team to communicate with each other,
in hopes that improved communication will better inform the decisions people
are making daily.
Just do it
My
sabbatical learnings will be different from yours, but I’m betting that, in any
case, the experience will be transformational both personally and
professionally. Once you’ve been working on something for at least three years,
it’s important to take a step back and see what the universe has to teach you.
No excuses … just give it a go. I’d love to hear your story when it’s over.
https://www.helpscout.com/blog/sabbatical-from-work/?utm_campaign=Weekly%20Digests&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=71769460&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_HNKRe-CCVrHRSPtSL4hrNuunvzmRCHrbWxpDJcyp2UbHZIlG51kYaIb5-ZKul_6SXZmcpt7gWEhXhlTDc-gJ6hZeT2mirLlUPGorXKc3MGwwuqYI&_hsmi=71769460
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