I Love You To The Core

This is an internal memo I wrote to our team today as we launched a new core value: Start with Love. We're not perfect on this, but I think it should be core to all companies, leaders, and teams. We'd love for you to come on the journey with us - visit our Careers page.

It’s Valentine's season, and here’s the thing: I’m in love. 

When you join Levelset and get a Field Guide, there’s this quote from IKEA Founder Ingvar Kamprad on one of the first pages:  Happiness is not reaching your goal. Happiness is being on the way. It is our wonderful fate to be just at the beginning. 

It reminds me of something I read years ago in a pithy little book, The Monk and the Riddle. Speaking about being involved with a company that got sold, Randy Komisar explains:

When all is said and done, the journey is the reward. There is nothing else. Reaching the end is, well, the end...When we looked around the room at each other, the deal's downside hit us: it was unlikely we would ever work together again. 

I later realized what a rare privilege it had been to work with this group of people, in a place of our own making that gave us the opportunity to reach and stretch, to have impact, and to be great. Building a $90-million-a-year, market-leading business was a hard thing to do. Claris gave us, as a team and as individuals, a platform for growing and a chance to build a legacy and a culture that would contain our DNA in its values for decades to come. You couldn't put a price on it, and I didn't realize that until our company was dead and buried. 

It’s the honor of my life to be the CEO of this company and to work with you. It’s extremely humbling to watch an idea hatch, and sprout, and turn into this -- into each one of you, with all of your journeys to here and through here, who choose to join this mission, who work hard and pour heartache into this mission, and who ultimately give their best to our shared work. 

We are so lucky. 

We’re lucky for all the water that’s under the bridge already and what we’ve done together, and more, for the bridge that stretches into the horizon of what we can continue to do together. 

And with the world-class company culture that we have...because of you...we can actually do anything together. These things don’t happen often. They don’t happen at will. They don’t re-happen once they’re gone.

What’s the secret to it?

A company’s core values aren’t brainstormed and selected. 

Over time, like an archeologist who has to dig and remove the dirt that’s covering an artifact, a company discovers their core values. Core values are things that rest in the heart of the organization.

In this case, for some time, I’ve been talking to people in the organization and thinking about what else is in our heart. And there’s something that jumps out to me: Love.

And it’s something pretty specific about love. 

It’s not just what love is, but it’s also important about what love is not. 

I was first introduced to the contrast between love & fear by an early, unlikely mentor (Fred LeBlanc), who first read about it in a book by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the psychiatrist who invented the “5 Stages of Grief.”  In this book, Kübler-Ross explains: “There are only two emotions: love and fear...for we cannot feel these two emotions together, at exactly the same time. They're opposites. If we're in fear, we are not in a place of love. When we're in a place of love, we cannot be in a place of fear.”

Over the years I’ve paid some attention to this concept, and recently read more about it in Heroic Leadership, which is a leadership book using the lessons of Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit Order (a Catholic religious order). It’s interesting to look at the concept of love in religious doctrines, because all across the world in all religions, there is this interplay between the notion of love and fear.

As for Ignatius Loyola, he counseled Jesuits to govern using “all the love and modesty and charity possible” so that teams could thrive in environments of “greater love than fear.” 

Environments of greater love than fear…

Here is how this plays out.

We sometimes have team members get frustrated, struggle, or go through difficult times. Maybe someone in the organization is mad about something, or maybe even mad at the organization. Managers can debate about what to do, and it’s easy for the conversation to gravitate toward fears. Fear that the team member may leave. That the team member is going to __blank__.  And instead of  thinking about how to protect against these fears, we stop the conversation for a second, and ask ourselves to approach this issue starting with love.

We frequently have users encounter problems using the product and they are stressed. They come to us, sometimes in a state of panic, fear, or anger. And over the years we’ve made a lot of mistakes by starting from a position of fear. The fear we’ll lose the customer or the fear that we will be exposed having done something wrong. The Customer Success team has rallied around a value to guide them to the right place: be human. They explain that “our company and customer base are made up of humans. We should always operate with empathy and compassion, strive to do the right thing...use the golden rule to treat others the way you want to be treated…” -- in other words, to stop and approach interactions by starting with love.

I recently wrote an article on LinkedIn about my experience growing up with entrepreneur parents.  My parents had a service business, and something I learned at the kitchen table is how to obsess about serving your customers and your team.  When we think about delivering on our mission to empower people to always get what they earn, and when we obsess to build and scale our product, we are guided by our commitment to serve; to help first.  As I summarized in that article, “My parents didn’t go into their businesses with a “care” thesis. They just cared. That’s how they started and how they got to the right answers. And they taught me to find the right answers by always starting with love.”

It’s part of our DNA to start with love.  

To start with love with each other, with our users, with our product, and even with our competitors.  And so -- to continuously remind us of this and hold us accountable to it -- we’re introducing a new core value:  Start With Love.

And this brings me back to the beginning.

There’s something else we should remember about starting with love: Our journey. 

Our time together. Our little moment and the bridge that stretches into the horizon of what we can continue to do together.  

In The Monk & The Riddle, Komisar writes that “anyone can sail with the wind to his back. Startups usually sail into a stiff wind, leaking like a sieve, in high seas, without food or water.”  

This should remind you of the Levelset Warning Label. There’s a lot of unknowns out there in front of us. A lot of stiff wind, leaks, seas, and starvation. There’s a secret to how we’ve navigated things so far at Levelset. The secret is that we aren’t afraid of the unknowns ahead -- we’re in love with the here and now.  

You can take it from the IKEA Founder, Happiness is being on the way. It is our wonderful fate to be just at the beginning.  Or from our own Gretchen Lynn, “What a time to be alive!” Or Martin Roth, “Today is going to be a great day!”

Today is a great day.

Thank you for everything you do.  For the work in the easy days and the hard ones. For how you treat one another. For living our core values and delivering on our mission. For believing in me. For striving to always start with love.

Happy Valentine’s Day - I love you.