My management career bloomed during the high-tech days of Friday Beer Busts. They were times of high-growth, strong cultures, and an engaged workforce. Looking back, it came to me that beer busts were a rhythm of communication, connection, and celebration. They were gatherings by proximity, not function, level or circumstance. Every Friday, you got to hear the latest “can you believe they did that” story in customer engineering or get an update from the district manager about his daughter’s first year in college. At Tandem, we also had First Fridays which were monthly teleconferences beamed to every location worldwide via Tandem TV’s private satellite network. First Friday was a half serious, half parodyhour-long “show” hosted by Buck Profitt (VP of Sales, Ed Sterbenc) who provided reports on business performance delivered the way Jon Stewart reports the news on the Daily Show. Every topic was delivered as a skit, with everyone from CEO Jimmy Treybig to R&D engineers playing roles. Like beer busts, they were not to be missed and I truly believe that they were major contributors to Tandem’s 10 year ascent to leader in fault-tolerant computing.
Rhythms are an essential element of the Gazelles Growth Method. Like beer busts and First Fridays, they are 10-30 minute events on every calendar that is never cancelled or rescheduled. Team, department, and organization members came together because they not only look forward to the information and celebration but often to simply gett together with co-workers they don’t see or talk to on a regular basis. Certainly, rhythms allow leaders a great opportunity to share success, create urgency, and recognize high performance. But creating true connection like this across an organization is priceless.
But how do you get everyone in the rhythm? I say take a lesson from beer busts. We looked forward to beer busts because management was always there and they relaxed and opened up, too. We got information and insights we couldn’t get day to day. Each one had a different theme – tracking the March Madness pool, dressing up for Halloween, planning the Bay to Breakers centipede, sharing pictures from TOPS (the Tandem Outstanding Performers boondoggle) or assembling a care package for the district manager’s daughter. Although it may not seem that a lot of business got done after 4:00pm on Fridays, I can attest that we actually got some pretty important things accomplished. The most important being the continuous development of and appreciation for the interdepencies and accountabilities we had with and to each other.
