Disrupt PR Culture — Seeking Excellence

Disrupt PR Culture — Seeking Excellence

Great PR changes lives. It sparks joy, fame, love, connection and power. Ever since humans learned to write and speak, sharing and telling stories has been essential to our happiness.

At Disrupt PR, we aspire to make people and brands household names. To help us succeed, we’ve created a unique employee culture. This article is about that culture, and how we can continuously improve as a team so that we can better serve our clients.

What makes Disrupt PR special is how much we:

1. Encourage decision-making by employees
2. Share information openly, broadly and deliberately
3. Communicate candidly and directly
4. Keep only our highly effective people
5. Avoid rules

The thing we most value is working with talented people in highly creative and productive ways. That’s why our core philosophy is?people over process, and why we try to bring great people together as a?dream team. Of course, any growing business requires some process and structure. But with our people-first approach, we can be more flexible, creative and successful in everything we do.

Valued Behaviors

We believe a company’s actual values are shown by whom they hire, reward or let go. Below are the specific behaviors and skills we care about most. If these values describe you, and the people you want to work with, you are likely to thrive at Disrupt PR.

Judgment

• You make wise decisions despite ambiguity
• You use data to inform your intuition and choices
• You look beyond symptoms to identify systemic issues
• You make decisions mostly based on their long term, rather than near term, impact

Selflessness

• You seek what is best for Disrupt PR, not yourself or your team
• You are humble and open-minded about others’ great ideas
• You make time to help others
• You debate ideas openly, and help implement whatever decision is made even when you disagree

Courage

• You make tough decisions without agonizing or long delay
• You take informed risks and are open to possible failure
• You question colleagues’ actions inconsistent with these behaviors
• You are willing to be vulnerable, in search of truth and connection
• You give and take feedback to and from colleagues at any level

Communication

• You listen well and seek to understand before responding
• You are calm in stressful situations
• Your writing and thinking are concise and coherent
• You adapt your communication style so you can work effectively with different people, including those who don’t share your native language or cultural norms

Inclusion

• You work well with people of different backgrounds, identities, values and cultures
• You are excited to help build diverse teams where everyone feels welcomed and respected
• You recognize we all have biases and work to counteract them
• You take action if someone is marginalizing a colleague

Integrity

• You exhibit and are known for candor and transparency
• You only say things about colleagues that you are willing to share with them
• You admit mistakes openly and share learnings widely
• You always share relevant information internally, even when uncomfortable
• You act with good intent and trust your colleagues to do the same

Passion

• You care deeply about Disrupt PR's success
• You inspire others with your drive for excellence
• You are excited about your work
• You are proud to connect client messages to the world
• You are tenacious and optimistic

Innovation

• You develop new ideas that prove impactful
• You look for every opportunity to reduce complexity and keep things simple
• You challenge prevailing assumptions, and suggest better approaches
• You are flexible and thrive in a constantly evolving organization

Curiosity

• You learn rapidly and eagerly
• You seek alternate perspectives to improve your ideas
• You see patterns and connections that other people miss
• You seek to understand members’ changing tastes and desires

Honest, Productive Feedback

At Disrupt PR, positive and constructive feedback is part of everyday life—not only an annual event. Meaningful feedback can be hard to give or accept. But like any new habit, it gets easier with practice. So we help people learn to give and receive feedback through coaching and modeling the behaviors we want to see across the agency. It takes courage and selflessness to ask someone what you could be doing better, or to ask yourself what feedback you have yet to share with a colleague. Both rely on trust and positive intent, which is why we invest time in developing strong professional relationships. We know this level of candor can be especially challenging for new hires, people in parts of the world or cultures where direct feedback is uncommon, and if there’s a power imbalance. But it is an important part of getting stronger, as individuals and as a company, because it’s what fuels our dream team.

Freedom and Responsibility

At some remote companies, team-members may come across a broken zoom link and avoid it; leaving it for someone else to fix. At other companies, people lean in to fix the problem, just like they would at home. We try hard to be a company where everyone feels a sense of responsibility to make us better. Fixing a broken zoom link is a metaphor for taking care of problems, small and large, and never thinking “that’s someone else’s job.” Creating a sense of ownership helps this behavior come naturally.

Our goal is to inspire people more than manage them. We want our teams to do what is best for the team. This, in turn, generates a sense of responsibility, accountability and self-discipline that drives us to do great work. Freedom itself is not the goal; the goal is creating a strong sense of caring for the team so that people do what is best for the agency.

In some organizations, there is an unhealthy emphasis on process and not much freedom. These organizations didn’t start out that way, but every time something went wrong the python of process squeezed harder.

To avoid this, we work hard to maintain employee excellence and keep our business as simple as possible given our growth ambitions. We want to be a company of self-disciplined, accountable people who discover and fix issues without being told to do so.

We have a generous vacation policy and flexible time-off. However, we have no tolerance for harassment of employees.

Representation Matters

Just like our clients, our employees have unique perspectives based on their backgrounds and experience. As we grow, we are working to make our employees, team-members/freelancers better reflect our targets readers, listeners and viewers so that we can better inform the world.

Ethical Expectations

Beyond candor in our day-to-day interactions, we act honorably, even when no one is looking. One test we use is to ask whether we would be ashamed if our actions were made public—and avoid doing anything where the answer would be yes.

Seeking Excellence to Drive Success

We do not seek to?preserve?our culture—we seek to?improve?it. Every new employee helps to shape and evolve the culture so we find new ways to accomplish more together. We are learning faster than ever, because we have more dedicated people with more diverse perspectives working to excel as the dream team.

That cultural excellence propels our business excellence, which increases member satisfaction and in turn propels our long term growth. It’s how we build an extraordinarily successful company providing exceptional PR services.

Summary

As we wrote in the beginning, what is special about Disrupt PR is how much we:

1. Encourage decision-making by employees
2. Share information openly, broadly, and deliberately
3. Communicate candidly and directly
4. Keep only our highly effective people
5. Avoid rules