Crossing the Delaware

Painter Emanuel Leutze was a German-born American immigrant. He painted 3 versions of Washington Crossing the Delaware. The original was destroyed during World War II. Another smaller version was hung in the White House from 1970-2014 and is estimated to sell at auction next week for over $15M.?

The third version is a centerpiece of grand scale at The Met, where some of the most amazing people I’ve ever worked with joined me in the epic spontaneous photo you see here. This is the story of how that happened and why that moment means so much to me.?

Big Red

I was brought into Verizon as the former startup leader who was there to teach the big telco how to operate like a modern tech company. To do this I was handed a budget with room to hire 3 heads (Verizon is well over 100k employees). It wasn’t nearly enough, but they thought startup folks knew how to operate with limited capital (insert joke here). These would have to be incredible hires.

In my early career, I’d managed teams in tough environments and had learned much through the bumps and bruises. One of my takeaways from scaling Venmo from 10 to 20 to 50 to ~100 (at the time of the PayPal acquisition) was that people and culture are the foundation of great companies. Building that culture starts with employee #1. You can accomplish a massive amount with the right group of people. We got a lot of things right at Venmo and had great camaraderie, but there’s always room to improve.?

I made building an amazing culture at Verizon the #1 goal. And I especially liked the challenge of doing that in a giant corporation like big red, who wasn't exactly known for their employee experience at the time. I’m proud of the fact that today Verizon is ranked as an amazing place to work. This is my little piece of how we got there, or crossed the Delaware, so to speak.

Founding team

There were very specific goals for the Verizon customer experience– a mobile-first strategy with a brand new app, modernizing the website, and fixing the clunky checkout experience across channels. But I knew hiring against those specifics would be a trap. Work continuously evolves and I needed to find designers who could solve the broader categories of problems.?

I focused my search on a product-centric, a marketing-centric, and a UI-centric designer. I needed them to also be broad generalists, self-sufficient, work extremely well together, and be capable of leading teams of their own. I was thinking way ahead while also addressing the short term needs.?

After 3 months of working tightly with recruiting and vigorously interviewing candidates, I had the founding squad with Julia Murphy, Jimmie Solomon, and Bill Chen. I’ll write another article on luck in business, but suffice to say I was incredibly lucky to hire that remarkable team.

Getting to work

Julia took on interaction design, Jimmie took visual design, and Bill focused on tough UI challenges. I further overlaid the business unit org structure to each design lead, essentially giving business directors their own dedicated design function. Julia led customer engagement, Jimmie led sales/acquisition, and Bill led ordering/commerce.

This approach allowed me to focus on setting up mini-startups. I call them pods, which are essentially individual cross-functional teams, consisting of a product manager, designer, and an engineer or two. I’ll save the details of my pod approach for another time (it’s made its way into every consultancy pitch) but it’s important here because it allowed for true autonomy for those teams. I remember sitting down with another VP and saying “we need to back off and let them ship.” This was apparently unheard of, but I got everyone to play ball, and probably a few gray hairs along the way.?

The pods’ impact was immediate and immense. I could easily map the impact of design initiatives to increased revenue and decreased cost. Finance could see $1 into my organization equaled $2 back to the P&L. Clearly it was time to scale the org.?

Leading leaders

My bet to hire designers who could lead was spot on. As Julia, Jimmie, and Bill started hiring their teams and managing various agency extensions of our org, we could see that their design specialization responsibilities, combined with their business unit leadership, was a great way to scale.?

This dual-pronged framework provided plenty of room for organizational growth. I added a design technology practice under Eric Winkle, a 10-year Verizon veteran who proved that transforming the stodgy telco into a modern tech company could happen from within. Creative agency veteran, Dawn Morris, came on to build our next-gen design (conversational and AI-driven experiences) and ops practice, managing horizontal needs like agency-based staff augmentation. Dawn and Eric hired a team of hybrid designer/engineers to take on a huge innovation project that would radically transform the service experience across the wireline and wireless businesses.

Three years into my time at Verizon we had gone from zero to over 50 employees and contract partners, with our org leading projects involving thousands of V Teamers company-wide, responsible for billions of dollars in business impact.?

Takeaways

There are way too many takeaways to list but a few things stand out.

Lay the foundation?

If someone is going to work on your team, get intimately familiar with the work ahead of their start date. Delegating is essential and important, but being oblivious to the problems being solved is not. Your hire will need you and rely on you to set them up for success. Even if the specific job is not your forté, personally invest your time getting familiar with it ahead of their start date.

Near yet far

I tend to spend a lot of time with my people early on–deep, deep in the weeds. I like to feel like I’m working for them or with them, side-by-side doing the work. And once I know they’ve got it, or are going to be ok, I get way out of there. I’ve heard feedback that it actually feels shocking when I step away, because all of sudden they have so much freedom that the autonomy can be daunting. I’ve seen great work come out of this approach, so I keep doing it and it keeps working.

Encourage camaraderie

I don’t have much appetite for internal politics. I’ve known leaders at every level and seniority who seem to get their kicks off of people on their team fighting for attention and adulation in hopes of a raise, or power, or who knows what else. I happen to think this is the wrong incentive for the types of problems I’m interested in solving. An executive-coach might tell you that some friendly competition on your staff is good for arriving at balanced solutions and helps preserve the hierarchy, blah, blah, blah... I’m not into it and I don’t buy it as anything other than self-serving careerism on the part of a leader. And don’t fall for the excuse that at the senior ranks there’s plenty of elbowing. Instead, make the world better, block and tackle, and don’t pass that toxicity on.?

Study innovation and you’ll quickly find that the biggest challenges are solved with small teams who unequivocally work together. The “1+1 = 3” approach. Be transparent about the importance of this and directly ask your team to spend time with each other early on, get to know one another, and realize they are all responsible for bettering the team. It makes a huge difference, don’t skip it. If you see weird politicking, stamp it out with fervor.

If you want competition, set up your goals and incentives so everyone knows what’s going on. The greatest competitors at the highest level in tennis are also incredibly close friends.

Don’t dive in

It’s tempting to think that your 360 view as a leader somehow imparts a better perspective on a body of work. It imparts a perspective and you’re likely missing a huge amount of the other perspective. No matter how smart you think you are, it’s highly unlikely that the summaries you get will somehow leave you in a better place than a strong team member on specific work they are engaged with everyday. If you don’t believe me, you might need my next tip.

Plant high trust

Trust is like a seed. You need to plant it early, water it, care for it, and watch it grow into something beautiful that you can rely on. Eventually it’s robust and hearty and makes everything else possible. Trust is a two-way street, but as a leader, you are responsible for it. If you don’t have it with someone on your team, it’s on you. Lies travel fast, truth travels slow. When you have trust you can play the long game, which is just good business.

During my time at Verizon we maintained a 100% retention rate in my organization, during a time when designers, engineers, and product managers were fiercely recruited. That takes a forest of trust.?

Be accountable

I prefer to give credit for success and ideas directly to my team and take responsibility for slip ups. But strong players on your team will invariably want to be directly accountable. That means you as the leader step out of the conversation and don’t play hero, which is typically for your own ego, nothing more. Something about balancing when and how to step out makes me better at my job and feels right as a human being. Folks seem to really appreciate this. Not much else to it.

Closing thoughts

“Doing nothing often leads to the very best kind of something.” – Winnie the Pooh.

This was written by A. A. Milne in post-industrial revolution England. A period of heightened productivity and huge ambition in business growth around the world. Milne served in both world wars and knew a thing or two about teams, goals, and perseverance. It’s easy to dismiss a phrase from a children’s book, a bit more interesting to think of the perspective of the person writing it and what their experience might impart into their words. This phrase is an important reminder to me of something I have certainly experienced with my teams.

Take walks, go on field trips, spend time together with your team intentionally not working. I certainly enjoy the time and can feel the difference in the team when they are back at it. If you’re remote, go for a walk while you talk on the phone about your favorite TV series or hobbies or nothing at all! Get creative and if all else fails, simply give folks some time back.?

Which brings us back to where this story began. The organization we built at Verizon was on one such field trip, to spend the day doing nothing at The Met, when we walked into The American Wing and saw our budding nation's first President in grand scale hanging on the wall.

Like A. A. Milne, Emanuel Leutze clearly channeled the importance of leadership in his painting, which dates to 1851, right out of the productivity-focused industrial revolution. I think that aspect of the work is what struck me when I spontaneously said “ok everyone, let’s recreate this painting!”

Without another word, in the brief moments between quiet museum passers-by, we all immediately knew what to do and where to pose. It felt like magic as we floated into position as one, captured in time without notice by the ever-present museum guards. A single photo, perfectly encapsulating everything I love about building amazing teams, and definitely my favorite version of Washington Crossing the Delaware.