This is a public shout out to our sales directors and development directors who left their cozy offices to carve out common ground right in the middle of The Nerdery. I’ve admired their unprovoked, bold move to blur the lines that separated their teams in order to improve our lines of communication. Instead of saying “Get off my lawn,” development and sales directors created The Lawn. Good call. It’s working.
No company can avoid people problems, and with 300+ people it matters more and more how we roll with changes. But organizational growth doesn’t have to mean more baggage and protocol, and we’re willing and able to reinvent ourselves in order to form a more perfect Nerdery. Our work is about overcoming challenges with technology, but technology can’t do this by itself – it takes people, relationships and trust to succeed. The business of custom software is very challenging. There will always be problems during production. We won’t pretend to have all the answers but we’re good at figuring things out – including nontechnical things of a more human nature.
The Lawn has become our fertile ground for cultivating relationships that allow us to handle problems as they arise. Eric Johnson, our director of project management, explains, “The Lawn provides Nerdery leadership with instant access to peers and interdepartmental leadership. We work collaboratively to solve problems and address company needs on a daily basis.”
The communication methods of our recent past were not keeping up with organizational growth, which introduced risk to employee experience, and, ultimately, customer experience and quality of work. Distributed leadership works well here because significant changes need not be top-down decrees. Territorialism is as out-of-place here as signs that say, “Get off my lawn.”
Instead of protecting their individual “lawns,” development and sales directors created a bigger, better lawn they could all share. The idea of leaving their comfortable existing workspace for something more collaborative was a sacrifice these Nerds were willing to take. Jon Pettersson, our director of software engineering, wasn’t exactly stoked. “I was very much opposed to moving to The Lawn at first. But after witnessing firsthand the efficiency of being able to simply get things done, I have been convinced of the benefits.”
Jake Trippel, director of our enterprise partner program notes, “I have had the awesome opportunity to get to know my colleagues better personally, as well as professionally.”
The simple, effective solution of physical proximity in The Lawn is a testament to the pragmatism and humility of our development and sales leaders’ ability to adapt to the needs of our growing company. Where they could have built new process, rules, or protocols, they opted for simple relationship building and physical collaboration. For years we have bragged to potential recruits that they’d never hear the phrase “read the f&#*ing manual.” I’m stoked to say that “get off my lawn” is not welcome either.
