Today, many things happened. Started with a fantastic mentoring conversation with Brigitte Kovacs, a Director of Discovery & Design in Canada. Then onto the final book club session for Design that Scales, and got to meet and ask the author—Dan Mall, founder of Design System University and Great Job!—questions to help my own practice. Then the day took a slightly longer detour than planned, in helping a neighbour when they called for help.
So! Here’s a slightly repurposed & “redacted” summation I wrote on behalf of the Partner Tech Leadership Team at Booking.com, from 2019. I consider it one of my “portfolio pieces” but don’t know how to work it in yet.
Context
I facilitated the day, preparing by designing it with my manager, Lalli Varadh at the time. As we worked through the conversation, I found the conversation taking interesting twists and turns, kinda-sorta-sounding-a-bit-like we were forming our team values and purpose.
There was no intent, coming into the room, that we would do that. But, I saw the underlying pattern of the conversation, called out what the topic we were really talking about was. We adapted the day and purpose, and dug in.
I took ownership of the task—the one I may have added to the board of tasks😅—to write up and share the results of what we talked about, to share with the broader department we led (around 300–400 humans at the time).
I’ve done very minor adjustments and editing: adding some paragraph spacing, changing commas to periods, leveling titles to today’s role structures, and typographic styling. Everything else is as it was published to our teams.
Enjoy.
Partner Tech’s Leadership Values and Purpose
On Wednesday, March 6th, the Partner Tech Leadership Group, comprised of Technical Principals, Directors, and Senior Director met together for some team building and organizational health update. As part of the team building, as we shared each of our Meyer Brigg’s Personality types.
Our conversation flowed into defining team values and purpose.
In an effort of transparency, and accountability, we want to share these out to who we work. These aren’t values and purpose for Partner Tech and Product. They’re not part of what we expect our teams to hold themselves to. This is how we, as a team, want to ground our work in and strive for.
Our Team Values
Collaborative
We work together. There shouldn’t be a project, or aspect of our work, where we’re not collaborating. We work in an intricate, complex product and tech environment. Directors should rely on our Principal counterparts for direction and support for each of the crafts and needs that we have around the product. In the same, Principals work together with the Directors as we try to make greater changes to organizational culture, processes, and development.
Vulnerable
We want to work together from the foundation that we are allowed to be vulnerable. This doesn’t mean that we’ll all sit in a circle, working to tears while talking about feelings. This means that we won’t come from a place of armour, putting up shields. We’ll be vulnerably, and honestly, ourselves with each other. If we are honest about what we fear, have frustrations on, our hopes, or dreams, we aim to build that respect for each other.
Trust
We want to be honest, we want to be trusting of each other. We want to come from the position that everything we do, it’s in an effort to lift either each other or the product up. We’re not here to attack. We don’t want to mistrust each other and create a culture of competition between ourselves. If we collaboratively work together, with vulnerability, we need to have a high level of trust between us.
Accountable
It’s easy to talk the talk, but we want to make sure we’re walking the walk. We will hold each other accountable. Be this the good, the bad, the ugly, we are accountable for the technology and culture that is encapsulated within Partner Tech. We’re accountable for the what we say we’ll do, and we’ll hold each other to that.
Trust. Vulnerability. Accountability. When these three are working in sync, they beget responsibility. We also hold ourselves responsible to the decisions we make, whether they be good, bad, hard, or easy.
Purpose Driven
We can work on these values, but we will go in very many different directions unless we have a shared purpose, and use that purpose to drive the work that happens in our teams. In the same way a team needs a purpose, vision, or mission, so should we.
This last value framed the next question, well, “What’s the team purpose?”
Our Team Purpose
Enable delivery of high quality products for partners while investing in our people’s growth. #oneteam
Let’s take a look at this, breaking it down.
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Enable delivery of high quality products for partners...
We’re not interested in using the latest and greatest technology due to popularity and “leading the tech industry.” Whatever we build, or use, we want to use technology to see what we can do for actual people, our partners. We want to develop this trust with them on making a high quality product, to help them run their business to make it the best it can be with us as a partner. -
...while investing in our people’s growth....
Even if our ultimate responsibility has to take the larger Booking.com business into account, we invest in our people. As craft experts, as people managers, as leaders, we can’t do anything without our people. As our people grow and develop, so does our product better.
A large aspect of leadership is knowing and understanding more of yourself, and who you are; we want to grow people and facilitate their growth to become the better, future leaders of Booking.com.
- #oneteam
As Booking.com grows, it becomes harder and harder to have “visibility” or “get ahead” in some sense. It’s easy to fall into the ego-driven, competitive trap that comes with it. When we’re scrounging for more people to achieve where we see we could take Partner Tech, when the business isn’t hitting double digit growth numbers, competition comes quickly. We don’t want this.
We want to work together, as one team, without that competition. We’re all here for the same purpose, and we’re all building the business’ success, together. And we should work, as #oneteam, to achieve this.
Thank you, and let’s move forward, together!