“This is a really intellectually interesting place to be”

The title of this story comes from SmartBear CMO, Cynthia Gumbert , who said this at one of our recent Global Leadership Councils. These quarterly offsites are where our managers from around the world gather together to share recent wins, unveil exciting items on the horizon, and learn how to be better leaders to our fantastic colleagues.

There’s often an ask-me-anything (AMA) where we in the audience are encouraged to put our c-suite leaders on the spot, something our CEO, Frank Roe , loves doing to us at any opportune chance to do so. In our most recent gathering, Tom Salah , with only two minutes left in the AMA, asked the six members of our c-suite who stood in front of us to explain why today, with all of the current economic uncertainty, is a great time to be at SmartBear, so that we could share those reasons with our teams.

While “This is a really intellectually interesting place to be,” wasn’t Cynthia’s entire response, it really struck me as not merely a nice-to-have, but a critically important workplace quality.

Challenge management

Tom’s question was a great example of a freedom we all feel here to not only challenge-down, but to upwardly challenge, even to our highest level of leadership or longest-tenured employees. There are no carte blanche, never-challenged, never-questioned, never-put-on-the-spot-in-front-of-your-peers expectations here.

You’ve probably had a boss say to you, “I want to challenge you…” It’s a pretty common line. But how often do you feel the freedom to directly challenge someone equal to you in title or someone who’s actually above you? That’s not uncommon here at all, and it absolutely makes things “intellectually interesting” for each other, and ultimately for our customers, too.

Avoid conflict and you’ll avoid progress, too

With so many of our marketing leaders in town for this gathering, we also scheduled our own marketing leadership offsite during the week. The goal was to work together to select the most impactful initiatives for revenue growth in the coming year and to also come up with new ways to keep our marketing team members feeling appreciated, engaged, and always learning.

On paper alone, the agenda that Timothy Sroka put together for our leadership team looked…fine. Breakouts, open discussions, group presentations, a Miro board, a review of our RASCI, etc. However, after a couple of days to fully digest those two half-days of uninterrupted time together, I now look at what Tim designed for this team as pretty brilliant.

If you weren’t present for this offsite, and you’re reading this story, you might assume, “That agenda must’ve resulted in some amazing collaboration!

If you were present for this offsite, but you weren’t familiar with the amazing marketing leaders that make up this group, you might’ve thought to yourself,

“They kind of fought…like…a lot.”

I can assure you that was not the case. We did not “fight,” at all. Did someone at our team happy hour after the offsite say, “Well, that got…lively,”? Yes, because the conversations did get lively. "Lively" is what happens when there’s mutual respect shared between people of different backgrounds and different areas of expertise and who anticipate being challenged. We know the tremendous growth opportunities those challenging conversations create.

Every member of this team will:

• Passionately advocate for our individual teams and our customers
• Present ideas and plans that may be based on our own areas of expertise…but which do not discourage or exclude any other team’s involvement.
• Have zero reluctance to challenge each other, our team members, and our managers to think bigger.

This team works so hard and so fast on so many different projects year-round; it’s rare for us to get this sort of time together. But when we do, it’s so valuable. I’m thankful that we each care so much about our various passions that none of us block someone with a different opinion from expanding our points of view further than we could’ve possibly done on our own.

We don’t always come to a complete, unanimous decision on every topic we discuss, but I doubt that’s anyone’s hope anyway. It would be a lot less “intellectually interesting” around here if we did always agree, and our new directions would lack diverse points of view from some very smart people. The lively discussions this group has never shied away from have, time and time again, directly contributed to the positive outcomes of so many new initiatives we’ve embarked on together.

Collaboration: One weird myth

Collaboration is a wonderful thing, and we seek it out all the time. But have you ever noticed the always-rose-tinted-glasses assumption of what collaboration supposedly looks like? Do a Google image search sometime of “collaboration photos” and check out the results.

If I'm the woman in the middle I'm about five seconds away from a complete panic attack. Back...UP!

Group high-fives, fist bumps, everyone’s smiling, laughing hysterically in some cases—every photo shows only full agreements and buy-in on every idea being presented. Oh, and then you’ve got lots of photos where everyone’s arms are outreached into the center of a circle, everyone’s hands stacked on top of each other, right before a “Gooooooooooo TEAM!” I have never done this, seen this, or heard these chants done by others in a nearby room.

So...much...touching.

While these things might happen at some individual point during collaboration (maybe minus all the supposed rampant high-fiving and hand-stacking) they’re far from the entire picture of what actual collaboration often looks like.

Some of my all-time favorite collaborations look a lot more like one of my favorite memes.

For anyone who somehow hasn’t seen the commercial this comes from, I encourage you to watch it here. In fact, even if you have seen it, give it another go. And then another. It’s still incredible.

It’s through those initial disagreements, difficult questions to answer, confused faces in the room, and a culture that’s darn-near thankful when “conflicts” arise that you often reach your most powerful outcomes. Your point of view should always be welcomed, but you should also welcome those who can help you, respectfully, see something in a different light.

Be grateful when others help you do that without being asked, and for being part of a culture where you’re just as welcome to do the same. You built that “intellectually interesting” culture together, as a team.