Work personality types: there are a lot of them. I'm going to tell you a story about a young engineer. Once upon a time, this young engineer spent his work hours in an enclosed cubicle at an office where personal computers and scientific calculators were designed. He...
Company Culture Posts
This Is How Managers Can Avoid Conflict In The Workplace
No one enjoys conflict in the workplace, least of all the managers who have to deal with it. Naturally, the best way to clean up the mess is through conflict prevention. As the saying goes “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” and prevention is the...
This Was My Single Biggest Mistake in Building Company Culture
Confession time: I made a mistake—one that I’ve been working to correct. I’m hoping that sharing my missteps in building company culture will help save some of you from having to learn the same lessons the hard way. More specifically, my failure to define the culture...
How We Jell at Rackspace [Interview with Juan Montemayor]
The first thing you see on Rackspace’s website says everything you need to know about who the company is and what it offers. Trusted by the majority of the Fortune 100. A leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for cloud-enabled managed hosting. The largest managed cloud...
How We Jell at Growthwise [Interview with Steph Hinds]
It's not easy being accessible. Just ask Steph Hinds. As the Head Ninja at Growthwise, she’s built a successful company by making sure an entire team of accountants, advisors and administrators is consistently approachable and available—at all times, for every client,...
An Unusual Example of the Power of Positive Feedback from Johnnie Walker
Positive feedback is a powerful thing. It can turn ill-tempered toddlers into angels. It can transform couch potatoes into recreational athletes. It can motivate an underperforming team to achieve lofty goals. But you may be wondering: What does positive feedback...
How We Jell at Chargify [Interview with Adam Feber]
In our first installment of How We Jell, we talked to Jacob Krall of Fog Creek Software. Today we bring you more communication and collaboration insights from a team leader at another fast-growing company: Chargify... Adam Feber is an inspiration. O.K., so we might be...
How We Jell at Fog Creek [Interview with Jacob Krall]
If you follow today’s fastest-growing startups, you’ve probably read about Fog Creek Software in coveted media clips like this one from Fast Company. The most impressive part? The company is being featured not only for the success of its software, but also because of...
The Power of Positive Feedback to Build A Happy Productive Team
What makes for a happy, productive team? Before we answer that, let’s take it back a couple of decades. In the early 1990s, psychologist John Gottman wrote a book based on years of research that definitively answered an elusive question: What is the number one...
Don’t Let Remote Work Kill Your Culture Of Camaraderie
Camaraderie in the workplace is impossible to achieve without a fully developed company culture. True company culture—the kind that’s studied, scrutinized, and shaped into clearly-communicated core values—is what separates a business that stays afloat from one that...