Building teams, part five: building trust and earning loyalty

Building a foundation in eight hours or less.

You’ve got eight hours, and the clock is ticking.

In this series, I’ve talked about four things that are super important to building great product teams: the most important interview question, the product manager programming test, building diverse teams, and when to hire for PM skills or domain expertise. 

In this fifth and (maybe) final episode, let’s explore the simplest way to build trust and earn the loyalty of a new team member: make day one the foundation for engagement and connection.

Engagement and retention

Congratulations! You’ve navigated the recruiting, interviewing, negotiation, and hiring process, and today is your new team member’s first day. The competition was fierce, and you had to counteroffer twice. 

You found a strong PM with unique characteristics and skills that fill a gaping hole in your team. You need her to be happy, engaged, and productive quickly. She’s got options, and you need to build her trust and earn her loyalty.

On day one, issues with engagement and retention seem far away. The reality is that 70% of your employees are considering another job because they need more fulfillment in their current role. Only 30% percent of your team engages fully in their work. 64% are disengaged. 10-15% of your team grumbles loudly about dissatisfaction, pulling down morale and creating dissonance. 

Average attrition rates hover around eleven or twelve percent. Startup rates are twice that. Nearly 25% of employees at venture-backed startups quit after achieving their first equity vesting cliff.

The number one reason for this is whether employees feel connected to management and have some stake in the company's strategic outcomes. When they know their work has meaning, their day-to-day contributions are responsible for company success, and those contributions are recognized, they are happier and more engaged.

You’ve got a narrow window to build trust and earn loyalty. 

Day one: typical or extraordinary?

Think about your typical first day at a new job. You show up around nine, probably a bit overdressed, and someone comes to meet you, gets you a badge, introduces you to other team members, and shows you to your desk. At most companies, you arrive at your desk greeted by a laptop, phone, and some company-branded swag. It’s a pretty nice way to start.

However, the experience is likely identical to the three first days your new employee experienced over the previous six years. Your new team member has a closet full of company-branded t-shirts, hoodies, coffee mugs, fancy Patagonia vests and North Face jackets, backpacks, laptop sleeves, and leftover industry conference tchotchkes the People Ops/Marketing teams assembled for the new hire packets.

Then, you occupy most of the day in administrative tedium, setting up accounts, signing paperwork, and showing off your passport photo. You learn more new names than you can possibly remember. You make friends with the owner of the espresso machine, note the climate control situation, and find the nearest bathroom. You figure out where to fill your new company-branded water bottle.

Your manager, or sometimes their delegate, takes you to lunch. Over $25 Cobb salads, you chit-chat for an hour. It’s nice to be out in the sunshine and check out the vibe of the surrounding neighborhood. Back at the office, your manager says something like, “I’ll shoot you a slack with some priorities and some names of people to meet with this week. That should get you started.”

If you are lucky, your product leader stops by for an hour to talk. 

And then…

The first eight hours

Let’s say you want to retain this new team member for five years. You are asking for 9,000 hours of her time. Product leaders: spend the first eight of those nine thousand hours with every new hire. 

It is your responsibility to instill a mindset, demonstrate how core values like openness, honesty, and transparency work in your product organization, and create a foundation for engagement and fulfillment. If you don’t do it, no one else will.  

I often spent maybe an hour with a new team member on their first day. I told them things like, “My door is always open. Call or text me anytime. I am here to help and support you. Family is important, and we value flexibility.”  But I was too busy to give more time; my schedule was absolutely packed. What I said and how I behaved didn’t match.

The mismatch between words and behavior is your team member’s first experience with how you run your product organization, and it sucks.

Plan your whole day to show your team member how you run your product organization. Help her with your job and have her help you with yours. Remember, you should hire people you believe have the ability and capacity to take your job, so treat them like they might.

Show her how you work and what you expect of yourself. Help her complete all the tedious onboarding tasks or give her permission to defer them until later. Show mistakes and vulnerabilities, ask for guidance on crucial upcoming decisions, share your challenges, articulate your insecurities, and ask her for help.

Show that she can trust you and demonstrate exactly how you intend to build her trust.

What about remote teams?

Well, you fill your day with Zooms anyway, so be on those Zooms with that day’s most important person. 

I recently hired an all-remote team, and one of the things I’d do differently is make sure I traveled to each remote location to be with my new team member on their first day. I didn’t meet some of those people in person for months after they started.

A global pandemic got in the way of travel and face-to-face connections, and we made the best of it. But I often felt like I’d missed an opportunity to connect, build trust, and earn loyalty how I wanted to. Damn Covid.

Time to Value

The most important metric for our products is time to value. We want our customers to experience value from our products in as little time as possible, and the metric I love is ten minutes or less. I constantly set and reinforce time-to-value as the most important metric. The product organization exists to create the conditions and build the product that helps our customers achieve that value.

Your new team member should also feel productive in ten minutes or less. An excellent tactic is to meet her when she arrives, grab a coffee, and tell her, “Hey, before we start with all the usual day-one stuff, I need your help. I’ve got a pressing decision I need to make. Here’s what success looks like, what it will cost to achieve, and the risks and opportunities. Can you help me figure out the right thing to do?”

You are immediately collaborating, communicating about important company decisions, and sharing responsibility and authority with your new team member. Of these first eight hours, these might be the most important ten minutes.

Another good tactic is to ask her to help figure out how to institutionalize the collaboration, communication, and decision-making you worked on together. The most successful companies figure out how to institutional data, information, and decision-making because like it or not, your employees will leave–sooner than you want them to–and it’s catastrophic if each takes all their tribal knowledge with them.

Your company is not a family.

Only executives think this, and it simply isn’t true.

I’ve worked for a couple of companies that referred to the team as an Ohana. One published a picture book and distributed it to the team. The book included photos of people who’d already departed the company. Mine went in the book giveaway pile.

Appropriating Polynesian culture with boozy events and Hawaiian shirts isn’t culture. Articulating and living your core values and principles is how you create the mindset that establishes your company’s culture.

Your company is a team, like a football, soccer, or baseball team. During the company's life, you’ll select members that fit the strategy you are trying to execute, sometimes optimizing for speed and agility, sometimes opting for power and aggression. If you adapt to a new strategy and your speedy, agile team member’s skills don’t fit your new power-driven program, you’ll replace her. 

Families don’t boot members when times are tough or strategy changes. Outstanding teams are adept at bringing in the right players to run different iterations of your playbook appropriate to the stage of the company or where you are in your product’s lifecycle.

Live your core values and principles.

Rhetoric suggests employees are to blame for high attrition rates, lack of engagement, and the loud/quiet quitting trends. However, leaders are accountable for these trends, and we are responsible for addressing them. 

The most important step when working in and building teams is to live our core values and principles and establish that mindset and behavior on day one. We ask people to work long, hard hours. So our job as leaders is to make that work fulfilling, to keep people engaged in the strategic outcomes of our product organization and company, to build trust, and to earn loyalty.

You have eight hours on day one. Make them count.

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How do you build trust and earn loyalty? How do you work to improve retention? What tactics do you use to help team members feel engaged and fulfilled by their work?

Let me know in the comments.