Monkey Monday - January 20th, 2020

3 cool things for a better work life

Fun stuff | Monkey Mondays | Business development

How time flies. It’s Monday again already! A while back we shared a vlog talking about a few cool things we’ve come across in our travels, and today we’re bringing you another three. If you have a spare moment, why not check them out? They might change your life! Probably not, but you never know.

Here's the breakdown

00:37 - Holacracy

03:04 - OKRs

05:01 - Imposter syndrome

Clicky linky

We’ve got some juicy links for you to peruse here too.

Here’s a website all about how to create a holacracy and the benefits of doing so.
And here’s the Blinkist book where Matt and Chris learned about OKRs.
Finally, here’s the TED Talk by Mike Cannon-Brookes about imposter syndrome. This is a common symptom for people who suffer from anxiety, and it can be really powerful to learn you’re not alone.

Freebies and downloads

Links

Holacracy
Blinkist
Mike Cannon-Brookes | How you can use imposter syndrome to your benefit
Mind | Anxiety

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Transcript Show / Hide

Cinematic punching. I didn’t really hit him, it’s fine. Are you alright?

I’m just a really good actor.

He is a great actor.

Hello.

Hi, I’m Matt.

I’m Chris.

And it’s another…

Monkey Monday.

See, I’m making you do that. So we’re just gonna share three things with you today - three cool things that we’ve found. And we’ve adopted some of these things ourselves, and it’s just some ideas to help you improve your business, give you some ideas, as we leap forward into 2020.

Yeah, and the first one is holacracy.

Yeah, so, we’ll tell the story actually. So when we looked at growing our own company, we kind of started looking at what sort of company we wanted to be, and we planned ahead, and thought about the team that we wanted. And I started drawing this out, and I put one of our great creatives up here and I thought wouldn’t it be great for him to have a team under him, and he could manage that team. And I started drawing this hierarchical tree and then I quickly realised what I was doing, and this was like some sort of awful dystopian management tiered thing, and I thought this isn’t us at all. So then I started drawing some circles instead, I thought well no, we’re not hierarchical like this. We’re more sort of small circles of teams. And then I thought what am I doing? I’m making up my own management theory here. So I did a little bit of research and we came across something called holacracy. It’s definitely worth checking out. And it embraces the idea of sort of flat management theory, but it takes it one step further and it’s about creating sort of circles and creating teams and creating experts in those teams. And in Rusty Monkey we have two main - well three main circles - but two are creative and technical, and they’re two circles, and then we’ve got a growth team under here which looks after the direction of the business. And then we build smaller teams, to help look after a certain customer, or help deliver a certain project. But it’s definitely worth considering. What it does, it disseminates leadership throughout your company. And the benefits we’ve seen from that are a real sense of satisfaction across the team, and adoption of the culture, and more entrepreneurship within each team member itself.

Yeah, and we’re really just about trying to make all of our team members happier, in a way. And a lot of other companies who do this around the world are actually quite good places to work. So Zappos is a favourite example across in the States, and they do it. But we’re only on the start of our journey on this, so we’re hoping this year to really go wholeheartedly into it, and we’ll see how it goes.

Yeah. Maybe you’ve got some other interesting new management structures out there that you’d like to share with us? We’re always interested in that sort of stuff.

The second thing we’ve looked at is OKRs. Which stands for...

Objectives and…

Key…

Results?

Yeah, something like that. These are kinda there to replace KPIs, I guess, or - you know - not necessarily take their place, but move away from this idea of numeric goal-driven performance indicators. And one of the best examples I think I’ve heard about this is a company set up an objective - and their objective was to receive one ‘thank you’ email a day. So it moves it away from, you know, let’s output 500 widgets, or let’s reach this certain milestone, or let’s grow our team by 50 people. These are arbitrary figures that don’t really mean anything. Sales targets, in particular, are a bugbear that I have. You must sell X amount of money but nobody cares about the journey of how they’ve sold that much. And that’s probably more important. But the idea with OKRs is you set objectives that have real meaning behind them. So the idea of one ‘thank you’ email a day. Imagine your team’s getting to the end of the day and they haven’t had their ‘thank you’ email, it encourages them to go above and beyond, provide extra service and value to the customers, to try and get that ‘thank you’ email in. It’s about delivering a different way of running your business to try and improve both the happiness of those inside your company and also the service you give your customers.

We learned this from a book - well, we did it via a Blinkist of a book - so I’ll put a link to Blinkist, which is a way of reading books very quickly, it’s like a summarising kind of app on your phone, which is good. So we’ll put links down there, and you could have a look. And you could tell us your OKRs.

Yeah, we’d be interested to see them. And the last thing is one that you’ve found Chris, wasn’t it?

Yeah, it was a TED Talk by an Aussie guy, about imposter syndrome, and the fact that in business most people feel as if they’re bluffing it. Even if they’re really like the head of some massive corporation, people feel like they’re imposters. And you should embrace that, in a way. Here’s a link, have a look. It’s really interesting, I thought. What do you think?

Yeah, I thought it was really good. In particular, the ending I thought was good, and he talks about how not to freeze in those situations - he talks about how he met his wife, which is really interesting, and that she mistook him for someone else, and he just rolled with it and carried on having a conversation [bit creepy?], but it led him to great things when he adopted the attitude of, ‘Look, it doesn’t matter if I’m in really deep water here, I’m just gonna keep going. I’m gonna see where this goes, and see where it takes me.’ And it took him to some really interesting places and experiences.

Yeah, I thought it was really inspiring - I took away that every day is a school day, and you can keep learning and just sort of expand your knowledge every day. I thought it was really good. So there’s three things that you can explore at the start of 2020 - that’s a bit scary, isn’t it?