More

When we started our organization we felt passionate about giving our employees more. More took the form of profit-sharing, trips to coffee growing regions, employee ownership, and the like.

We built a culture of: “This is your journey, Cat & Cloud can be whatever you want it to be!”

A choose your own adventure book of work.

As someone who values freedom and individuality, this idea felt really amazing. Give people the gift of freedom plus a few signals of our trust and belief in them, and they’ll do their best work, be rewarded along the way, and feel like they’re a part of something special.

It didn’t work. Too many captains with their own compasses sailing in different directions creating factions on factions. Factions I at times allowed myself to participate in. A workplace at times resembling a shattered window.

It would be easy to blame the people around us who took our gift of more and ran amuck with it, the people who misinterpreted our words and used them in ways we never intended but that would be passing the buck. I know the person responsible is the one I see in the mirror.

Our failure to be able to confidently say: “This is who we are, this is what we believe, this is where we’re going.” Our failure to own our expertise and honor the work we’d put in for decades. To trust our gut. To realize that honoring our vision is the best way to help others.

That bump in the road has led me down a path of rediscovering things I’ve always believed.

Culture

That there are a ton of amazing, talented, and capable people in this world. But for someone to shine as bright as they possibly can they need to be in the right place with the right people.

I believe we’re all more similar than we are different - we have this huge shared human experience that gives us the ability to respect each other and treat each other with care, and at the same time on the subculture scale which our jobs fit into, we don’t all fit in everywhere and that’s ok.

These subcultures of close friends, family, and work provide environments that channel powerful expressions for what I believe are people's superpowers. When we’re lucky enough to find these subcultures that truly spark the fire in our soul we’re capable of almost anything.

This is my hope. That more of us can feel empowered to seek out and find those places that align with our passions, talents, and beliefs. We’ll all have to make some stops along the way that are out of alignment for us — a first job, a summer, job, a job that we hate but keep anyway because hey, we gotta eat — and in those cases it behooves us to do our best work as much for our own practice and reputation as the ability to be of service for others.

More 2.0

I still feel strongly about workplaces giving their employees more. In looking back on the life cycle of Cat & Cloud and also my own experience as an employee it’s easy to see that not all gifts are created equally. Gifts like profit-sharing and employee ownership can’t create a strong culture. That would be too easy. Too transactional.

Gifts like freedom without limits won’t guide people to do their best work for the organization and others around them but only for themselves.

So what can you give? If you’re an employee what do you expect? You’ll have to figure that out for yourself. In our case we’ve found that a strong sense of direction, leadership, and giving people something to work for is better than simply giving them something.