When I became CEO, my first priority was to accelerate decision making and innovation within our company. As a leadership team, we worked to delegate decision making more completely. We spent less time making lots of decisions and more time curating culture—building an organization that makes great decisions. On the other hand, because we were spending more time off our floor and with the rest of the organization, we also spent less time with each other, which weakened our alignment and led to more misunderstandings.
We challenged our researchers and designers to help us think about how we could solve for what we saw as a series of leadership paradoxes. We need transparency, but also privacy. We need to be accessible, but we need to be productive. We need to spend time with people at every level of the company, but we also need time with each other. We need to shift back and forth from individual work to group work, from formal to informal, and from scheduled to ad hoc.