I'm Joining Slack. Here's Why.

In 1998 at the age of 21, I had a trial-by-fire chance to learn about leadership. After three years of doing in-home housewares presentations for Cutco Cutlery, I was given a small territory in California where I could recruit, train, and guide a team of college students for the summer. I suddenly had 38 people to care for while we worked tirelessly to challenge each other to reach our individual goals and collective potential. We competed with 400 Branch and District offices, and we excelled by focusing on recruiting exceptional people and trying to ensure that they were trained as well as possible. It was a daunting task, but we finished the summer with average sales per representative above $3,500, which was remarkable considering the attention span of a college undergraduate on summer break.

Back then, collaboration consisted of all-day in-person training sessions, weekly meetings, and daily phone calls to each of the 38 landlines on my team. Approbation was shared on whiteboards and printed newsletters while course correction had to wait until the next office visit. Highly urgent communication was conducted via pagers and return calls from pay telephones, and representatives had no standardized method for peer-to-peer sharing of best practices. It's a wonder we ever sold anything in those days.

By 2006, when I became the VP of Sales for a marketing technology startup, I thought the available tools had come so far. My distributed team was based in 9 different locations, but I had a rudimentary understanding of Dreamweaver, so I built and self-hosted a laughably basic intranet where we could share information with each other. It was an information security nightmare but, luckily, our competitors never imagined we would be stupid enough to post sensitive information on a public URL. Still, our team's culture and results thrived, and we eventually learned to use email, Salesforce, Sharepoint and instant messaging more effectively. It seemed like a completely new generation beyond the days of pagers and newsletters, but it still required too much filtering and formalization from a manager without sufficiently proactive collaboration across the team.

In the ensuing years of my career, our interactions became more complex, spanning multiple continents and perspectives while weaving various roles and teams. We jumped from solution to solution, trying Microsoft's Yammer, 37Signals' Campfire, Salesforce's Chatter, Google's Hangouts, Atlassian's HipChat, and our own homegrown video platform called VideoConnect. Each one came with its own advantages and challenges, but the nirvana we were seeking began to seem unattainable. How could we give our team a collaboration solution that was secure enough to let us sleep at night, flexible enough for each person and team to be productive, and fun enough to spark organic adoption without a decree from a fist-pounding manager?

Along came Slack, with its refreshing focus on the needs of its 5,000,000+ daily active users and its ecosystem of 900+ integrated apps. There isn't a business school or a leadership course that doesn't focus on this exact issue: solve a difficult problem for your customers and continue to listen to their needs over time. Allow them to build teams that have diverse talents, and foster their ability to communicate with each other in the ways they prefer best. Immerse yourself in driving value for those people, and they will share their experiences and results on your behalf.

After using Slack for the past couple of years, I am proud to join their team with the credibility and enthusiasm of a customer-turned-evangelist. Their recently-announced Enterprise Grid solution enables teams of all sizes (from 500 people to 500,000 people) to collaborate effectively wherever they are located. Slack would have helped us sell more cutlery in 1998 and it would have helped our marketing tech company grow faster in 2006. We could have communicated better with our South American, Asian, and European coworkers in the years thereafter, as well as our partners, customers, and stakeholders. The underlying principles of leadership haven't changed since I was making 38 calls a day to my representatives or publishing sales results via Dreamweaver - we still need to celebrate successes, share best practices, offer training resources, and inspire peer-to-peer discussions within the context of our own unique culture. However, the construct of our teams has changed, and Slack's platform is the result of a customer-focused response to that evolution.

Chances are, the area in which your organization can find the most improvement is in your effectiveness in working as a team. I look forward to working with you to help you improve in that area, just as I have been trying to do throughout the past two decades.