How to Create the Best Place Ever to Work with Tim Enwall

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Tim Enwall. Tim is the COO of Fermyon Technologies. He's a four- time startup CEO of companies including Tendril and Revolv, the latter of which was sold to Nest/ Google in 2014. Tim, welcome to The Daily Bolster.

Tim Enwall: Super excited to be here, Matt. Love it.

Matt Blumberg: One of the things I've always appreciated about you and all the conversations we've ever had is how much of a student of the craft you are. And by the craft, I mean the craft of being a leader, of being a CEO. You're super thoughtful about everything you do. And I know one of the passions that you and I share is for not just creating a good place to work or even a great place to work, but one you and I actually described the same way, which is I want to create the best place that people have ever worked. I know you use that same language. So when you think about that, what is your playbook for creating the best place people have ever worked?

Tim Enwall: Yeah, cool. I'm so passionate about this topic. It is not a five- minute topic, obviously. But the headline is Psychological Safety. If you read Google, Project Aristotle, Lencioni, psychological safety is the absolute must have, and for me it's then around four key factors. Hiring, you got to hire people who are deeply aligned with the necessities of psychological safety, high EQ, high humility, high team orientation. No politicians, no victims. No gossipers. No egotists. That's number one.

Matt Blumberg: All right, good people around you. Number two.

Tim Enwall: You got to a place of really high emphasis on good managers. Everything flows through the manager, all of the ability to work with high EQ, all the ability to get victimhood out of the equation and address issues, and work with people on their strengths and what the organization needs. There's just so much emphasis and so many people fail to recognize how critical managers are, especially middle managers as you scale. Man, you got to place emphasis there, and coach them and work with them. Number two.

Matt Blumberg: I'm with you. You can't do enough management training personally as the leader.

Tim Enwall: That's right. Exactly. And checking in and all that.

Matt Blumberg: That's right.

Tim Enwall: Number three, super high alignment of the person's strengths with the organization's needs. We use StrengthsFinder. StrengthsFinder is an amazing tool because it gives you such a rich vocabulary to have other people that hate doing stuff be helped by people who love doing stuff and vice versa. Oh, I love doing that. Let me step in and help that person that hates doing this. It's the essence of teamwork, and it's a great vocabulary. It helps people express themselves through that tool.

Matt Blumberg: I always think there's a coda to that, which is working outside of your job as needed to make that happen.

Tim Enwall: Totally, totally. And I've used DiSC and Myers- Briggs and all these other things in the past, and they're so constrained. StrengthsFinder is, so again, beautifully rich in the ways it can be used. And number four is super clarity and focus. Have a prime result. Lencioni calls it the rallying cry, every quarter, every season, and have decision- making clarity. It's the operating system that allows everybody to just do their job and have confidence doing their job because it's really clear what the organization's going after. The priority and the subsidiary components of that with clarity of decision- making. One of the things I think trips up so many people and gets into politics and all this kind of stuff is, whose decision is this? If you go into every decision having clarified that question and gotten any confusion out of the way, then you know, these are the input people. This is the decision- maker.

Matt Blumberg: Here's what I love most about your formula. All of those things are about having a high performing organization, not a single one about perks or policies. And presumably you do a good job of those too, but places you might. But all of these are about having a high performing organization because high performers do their best work and are happiest and most engaged in a high performing organization.

Tim Enwall: That's right.

Matt Blumberg: I love your formula for creating the best place people have ever worked. I have one suggestion for you, if you have not read Lencioni's newest book yet.

Tim Enwall: I have not.

Matt Blumberg: The Working Genius, I forget what it's called. It's called, oh, I don't know where it is. Someone took it from my desk, but something about work ideas.

Tim Enwall: Find it.

Matt Blumberg: It may replace StrengthsFinder for you.

Tim Enwall: Okay.

Matt Blumberg: At least augment it.

Tim Enwall: Yeah. Very good. I'm going to go get that as we wrap up.

Matt Blumberg: Tim Enwall, so good to see you. Thank you for sharing today.

Tim Enwall: Yep. Fantastic. Love it.