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Our Cultural Tendencies (aka How to Win With Us)
WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE TO WORK IN THIS CULTURE AND WITH THIS TEAM?
0) Get hot, stay hot
We hired you because we believe in you. We see something in you. Now you’re here. You’re in training and learning about the organization, your role here, etc. While you’re in training and throughout your tenure here we have a saying “Get hot, stay hot.” Most people upon getting hired get hot, but they don’t stay hot.
Overall, in most jobs, when people start a job the first 60-90 days they work really hard and show their stuff and get noticed. This is the get hot part. But after that initial trial period people get comfortable and start to slack off. They do a good job, but not exceptional.
This is where we as Wonder Dog employees differ. The bar is high for all of us. Why? Because we’re trying to grow into 100 locations and train 1 million dogs. So at Wonder Dog, we don’t just get hot upon hiring, we get hot and stay hot.
How do you do this? Simple.
You say what you’re going to do, and you do what you say.
You do your work and you do it well.
You keep our clients and their collective and individual experiences at the forefront of your mind.
You raise the bar for yourself and those around you.
You see what needs to be fixed and fix it.
You see areas where things can be better and you step-up and make them better.
You give feedback to your team and leaders and get feedback and take said feedback well in return.
You lead by example. Externally facing to clients and internally to your team.
You go above and beyond for yourself, your team and the organization as a whole.
You provide ideas and insights into what we can do better and help us see what we could be doing that we aren’t.
These are just a handful of examples, but I am sure you grasp the concept.
So don’t just get hot. Get hot and stay hot. If you do this, you will win. Not just here but in all areas of life. And if you do this and stick with this, there is no other option for your team and leadership team to see you, your contribution and your work and reward you for it.
Now… if we all do this collectively as a team and organization, we will win and grow to the level we all want. This allows us to be the best, serve our clients at the highest level, serve each other as team members and the organization at the highest level. And it pays well in terms of money, promotions in the organization, status among your peers, etc.
1) Clarity of Mission
We have a clear vision, mission, and value. We talk about our work and jobs and lives in our meetings. For some companies this is all rare to have such clarity about the mission and values. For others, people are just hired as cogs in a wheel so the lower-level employees only know their jobs while the managers see the bigger picture.
In our view, we want all of our teammates to be putting their shoulder to the plow, so to speak, to help us reach our goal of training one million dogs by 2050. We want all of our team to help us change the world by helping 1 million families to be happier! We care very much about your ideas and experiences to ultimately become better people as we reach for this extraordinary challenge before us.
2) Start-Up Culture
Start-ups like ours are not easy to work for as compared to more established or larger companies which have decades of corporate structure to rely upon. Start-ups are like speed boats that go fast and can turn fast. Things change ALL the time, love it and embrace it!
The chain of command is shorter in a smaller company, so your ideas/feelings/experiences have more weight here with us. Nothing is written in stone except the mission, vision and values. Job descriptions change. Compensation plans changes. Supply and demand changes, as do our growth plans and what we might focus on in any given quarter as we grow our team. Learn to roll with it.
3) Honest Feedback (We Are All Apprentices)
We all assume the role of an apprentice. We are all students and everyone is still learning.
This means that the feedback on our team is constant and goes in all directions. It’s crucial that we all give each other feedback on what we can do better. To those not accustomed to this, it may seem like criticism, but it is for the best. We all need to improve, as well as the company as a whole. It might feel a tad risky to give your supervisor some feedback on his ideas or even the owner of the company your honest opinion of his new campaign, but who else is going to tell us if you don’t?
Just be ready because you’ll be getting the same feedback, and to be honest, at first, MOST of the feedback is rolling your way. So just take the posture of an apprentice who has A LOT to learn and you’ll be in a humble attitude that can handle anything WITHOUT your pride or ego on the line.
So, we need your ideas and feedback and you need ours. We can’t drive improvements if we are holding back our real thoughts. This is part of Value #6, growth by doing hard things pays off big time. So we welcome respectful feedback, and new ideas on improving literally everything…even if you need to approach your supervisor about being moody or late to all your meetings or even something harder to speak of. Of course, timing plays a role in all this (is this a good time to bring this up?), and context (should I bring this up in the team meeting or in a private conversation or in a text?), as well as tone of voice (should I tell him that he’s messing this up or tell him I have some ideas for ways to innovate?).
4) Drink the Kool-Aid
People that don’t really give themselves over to our mission don’t do well and don’t last long around here because you have been hired to work with Wonder Dog and to help us with our overall mission, vision, and goals. This is entirely different than just clocking into a job, doing the minimum, and then clocking out to go back to your “real” life.
This means that we are looking for people who have drank the kool-aid or jumped down the rabbit hole. That is, we only want to work with folks who honestly want to help us train one million dogs by 2050 and build a game-playing tribe of dog-lovers who are increasingly enjoying life with their best friends!
5) Work Hard, Play Hard
It’s normal to get a job assignment that feels impossible to complete during a normal workweek. It's also not out of the ordinary to get texts at all times of the day and night as teammates fit work in at the oddest of times. This results in confusion for anyone who is not used to radical prioritization. Basically, you need to get your MUST BE DONE work done first, and then work on your longer term DEVELOPMENT in your spare time.
Give it your all, then rest. Rest hard. Which means to check out, do what you want, play, take some naps, go work in the garden, get lost on youTube or your favorite game. Forget everything about this company and go play. That is, we work hard, then we play hard, then we come back to work. (But be forewarned, while you think it’s crazy at first to be getting texts from the team at odd hours of the night, you might soon find yourself obsessed like we are and coming up with ideas at all hours.)
6) Stress and Pressure
There is stress and pressure in all directions. There is a pressure to perform, satisfy this family, train this dog, get your notes in the database, work with unpleasant clients and stubborn dogs and only God knows what else. To some people who have only worked boring jobs where they clocked in and clocked out, this is new.
There is weight and important things depend on you stepping up to the plate and coming through for the team. If you don’t do your job the right way then we all lose - money, reputation, time, energy, morale, and maybe even lost clients or employees. This is what you are buying into when you work for a company that cares about “each one."
7) Your Time to Leave
There are different seasons for all kinds of things in life. If and when your time with us is coming to an end because you want to move on, you have other opportunities, you disagree with us, or life is calling you elsewhere - then we will bless you to leave and will bless you however we can as we go, but let’s not drag it out. If you are ready to go, then we will bless that with no hard feelings at all. We want you to thrive, and if it’s not with us, then we want to go find your place in the world.
When it is your time to go, we do request that unlike traditional jobs where you give a two weeks that you instead provide us with a 4-6 week notice. This way we are able to plan accordingly and this allows us to hire and train someone else in the meantime.
8) Assume positive intent (API)
If you go back up to #3, we talk extensively about feedback. We talk about getting it and giving it. But we didn’t mention what to do with it when you do get it and you don’t particularly like the feedback you get.
When you get feedback for the first time, it can be painful to hear. In our search for truth and excellence, this is common. But when you get a piece of feedback, adopting a mindset of API can often be helpful.
We are fortunate at Wonder Dog to have a team who is kind and caring. Most of the time when getting feedback, even the kind that sucks, it comes out of a good place and it is meant positively. So when you get feedback and don’t like the feedback, that is okay, but adopt the mindset of API and remember that the feedback comes from a place of caring and positivity.
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