What's on your Poker Chip?

Every year at Axon we host a company kick off where we get the entire company together and talk about our goals for the year. About 10 years ago I proposed that we should give everyone in the company a poker chip at the kick off and they should write one main goal they were going to hit that year.?

Back then we had a few hundred employees and the exercise was pretty fun. Each person would actually get two poker chips and write their single goal on both chips with their name on the back. They would keep one chip and put the other one in a clear glass vase we keep at HQ. We did this in person, playing some pump up the jam music, each person would walk up and drop on poker chip in the vase and then keep the other one with them.?

So we did this for a few years and as the company grew I got the feeling this might be becoming a little gimmicky and the logistics of having a thousand plus people drop a poker chip in a vase in a single line proved pretty unwieldy one year. So the following year we stopped doing it.?

At the end of the kick off the year we chose not to do the poker chip ceremony I found my self surrounded by a group of employees. They weren’t happy. They asked why we didn’t do the poker chip? I told them well it was kind of unwieldy and I was unsure if people actually gave a shit about it. What I heard next was amazing. For 15 minutes the group told me how they carried the poker chip with them in their backpacks traveling, they kept it at their home desk, some even carried it around in their pocket. The common theme was that it was a commitment each person had signed up to deliver on. Obviously for the company, but also for their teammates and most importantly for themselves. The poker chip was a clear single goal that they were going to hold themselves accountable to hitting.?

The group then asked— demanded really- that we bring the poker chip back. So that year we scrambled to order them and mailed them out to all employees with a mea culpa from myself apologizing for removing what had turned into a key part of our culture.?

At some of our major customer rollouts our professional services team would have “successful roll out of X city” on their poker chip and customers would ask about it. One very cool moment was when Jason LaFond an NYPD Police Officer who runs their body worn camera program asked for a poker chip and wrote down, “Complete the largest body worn camera roll out in the world.” When they completed the roll out Detective LaFond sent me the poker chip.??

Today I love meeting with Axon teammates and asking them, "What's on your Poker Chip?"