Category: Organizational Growth

USV & Circl.es – Unlocking Social Learning in a Portfolio Community

: Circles Team

Union Square Ventures is a New York based venture capital firm that believes the best way to support their portfolio is by helping them learn and connect with each other. In addition to broadening access to content and community, their team has focused on building strong, trusted leadership networks across their portfolio of 115 active companies around the world. Their Network Lead, Lauren Young noted: “our team’s primary focus is to help our companies build better businesses. One way we do this is by increasing the speed of knowledge shared across the network.

“USV as a firm believes that we are not the experts in the room; rather, leveraging and building upon network effects can be one of the most impactful ways to build successful companies.”

USV as a firm believes that we are not the experts in the room; rather, leveraging and building upon the collective knowledge within our ecosystem can be one of the most impactful ways to help our companies build successful businesses.” Because of Lauren and her team’s proximity to the intense realities facing leaders of growing companies, they continually see the need to keep company leaders connected. “Building a company can be very hard, and today, the pace and intensity of growth and problem solving is never-ending. That’s why we seek out new ways to provide a trusted environment for senior leaders, executives, and founders in our portfolio to connect with industry peers.”

In the fall of 2021, as part of their ongoing efforts to connect leaders across companies, USV in partnership with Circl.es customized a version of Circl.es Foundations; a six -session journey of 90-minute sessions facilitated in curated small groups. Lauren explains how it fits a specific need in their broader learning and development curriculum: “Partnering with Circl.es has enabled us to provide a new layer of support: small group peer connectivity. Over the years, we’ve been asked by countless portfolio leaders for access to a space where they can ask questions and connect with others who are facing similar challenges. The foundation of this program was built from their feedback.”

“Partnering with Circl.es has enabled us to provide the exact layer of support we wanted– which was small group peer connectivity.”

Based on participant feedback, they have focused on two sorting criteria: department and seniority level. “Enabling participants to meet leaders who not only have the same functional expertise, but who are also facing similar leadership opportunities, increases the chances for them to develop stronger, more fruitful relationships.”  Lauren shared that one of the reasons they’ve partnered with Circles is to enable the executives in their network to really build a personal advisory board that they can turn to when they’re facing a challenge. Participants validated the importance of the peer element, with quotes like “I’m able to get perspectives on real time issues from peers” and “it’s great to have a place where I can be vulnerable with peers.”

Across the board, Circl.es Foundations yielded a fantastic response from USV participants: 100% of respondents would recommend the experience to a colleague. Overall, the feedback overwhelmingly validated the need for peer small groups in order to lead in the current climate. As one participant shared: “Being able to have a deep-dive session on problem-solving, and having it facilitated through a discussion broken up by certain themes, was very useful.” Participant Emily Bunin–Senior Controller at Kickstarter–shared that “transitioning into leadership as a professional can be challenging, and lonely at times. My USV circle provides a safe and supportive environment for me to face my fears, practice vulnerability, and remember that I’m not alone.” At Dwolla, Director of Finance Alicia Eichmeier mentioned that “it’s great to have a place where I can be vulnerable with peers” and Operations VP Jackie Ward said “it pushes me outside my comfort zone.”

“Transitioning into leadership as a professional can be challenging, and lonely at times. My USV circle provides a safe and supportive environment for me to face my fears, practice vulnerability, and remember that I’m not alone.”

Looking ahead, Lauren plans to continue to integrate participant feedback as well as the overall needs of the portfolio into this program. “Understanding our portfolio’s needs is critical to understanding where we, as a firm, can provide the strongest value proposition for them.” She appreciated the emphasis on strong facilitation, leadership-specific content and peer-led development that Circl.es has prioritized in their product and platform. Together, USV and the Circl.es team will add a layer of social learning into the fabric of the USV Network in 2022, forming new Leadership Squads each quarter, and providing peer learning & growth in a scalable format that reaches leaders one circle at a time.

Companies Need Community: Three Things I got Wrong About Culture

: Dan Hoffman

Circl.es is a radically distributed workplace: Brooklyn, Buenos Aires, Saratoga Springs, Portland, Barcelona, London, Auckland, Canberra. Since we’ve grown these last two years, I’ve gone from knowing everyone to not having met most of our team, which can make establishing culture tricky. As a company builder, culture has always been a big deal to me; and, selfishly, important to get right so I can be happy at work. Today I’m seeing flaws in my old ideas about company culture, and also noticing one big missing piece: community.

There’s a ton of proof that culture-forward companies outperform others in sales growth, profitability and stock price. I’ve written a lot about culture, and it’s always helpful to start with a definition. I like Greg Besner’s book, Culture Quotient, in which he lays out ten components of culture. He also talks about Schein’s model, a diagram where cultural artifacts are visible above the surface and beliefs, values, and assumptions appear below the surface. Both help me assess and work on culture, for sure.

But the parts don’t quite add up to the whole. Besner even gives himself a “catch-all category” after describing Schein’s model, adding that “employee engagement is a big part of the answer.” As I reflect back on our award-winning culture at M5 Networks where I used to lead–and what is happening now in Circl.es and the companies we work with–there’s something that transcends the ten components on this list, something I think was missing from the way I understood and worked with culture. Working without offices has laid this bare.

I have been trying to pin it down. Here’s a few things that have led to my conclusion that companies need community:

1. Culture isn’t merely top-down.
When I led M5, we constantly talked about “alignment.” We repeated our mission and core values in all-hands company meetings, until we were blue. We built company-wide programs to reinforce and work on culture. But as we grew, there was an undertow–a truth that constantly eroded our progress: True culture developed in pockets. The warren of engineers on seven lived a different reality than the sales team on the open floor on five. The team leaders (and certain other leaders on the team) had a much bigger influence–intentional or not–than anything I ever did as CEO. Real culture, it turns out, is circle by circle, team by team–it doesn’t flow down the neat lines of an org chart. Culture guru Stan Slap captures this feeling in the title of his book, Bury My Heart at Conference Room B. A leader’s job in setting culture is to create space for communities to form and flourish, then stay connected to them.

I learned the importance of staying connected while spending time with one of my favorite business thinkers, Pat Lencioni, at his first live conference just before the pandemic. One big takeaway was his simple advice that leaders actively care for their employees; that they ask and care about people’s families and life outside of work. I found this explained in his book The Truth About Employee Engagement: A Fable About Addressing the Three Root Causes of Job Misery, which talks about the power of managers taking a genuine interest in people’s lives, to avoid the damage to engagement caused by the feeling of “anonymity.” 

2. Culture isn’t just about getting work done.
The last two years have exposed this like dirty laundry behind us in a Zoom square. Despite HR’s best efforts to keep things simple and safe, avoidance of personal topics – like politics and health – can build up pressure until they explode (like at Basecamp last year, when a third of the company walked out). I’m not suggesting obliterating privacy, and we all need separation; in fact, this Forbes article asserts that bringing one’s whole self to work is a fad for millennial employees, and Fast Company warns that it’s a trend not accessible to many, warning that “not everyone has access to meaningful and engaging careers.”

“With executive support and enough individuals to engage, peer learning can contribute more than any other force I have seen to building connection and a vibrant, trust-rich community within an organization”

But a recent HBR article entitled “11 trends that will shape work in 2022 and beyond” describes it less as a trend and more as the changing face of the future workplace. One of the trends they list is the rise of the Chief Purpose Officer, because “Issues of politics, culture, and social debate have fully entered the workplace. Employees have been asked to bring their whole self to work as organizations try to create a more and more inclusive and productive work environment. This is fundamentally different than a decade ago when employees were expected to leave their personal perspectives at the door.” One of our longtime partners David Pachter of JumpCrew recently wrote an excellent book called Remote Leadership, where he lays out what he calls the three pillars of great remote organizations–and one of them is peer learning. He claims that “Peer learning is transformative. With executive support and enough individuals to engage, peer learning can contribute more than any other force I have seen to building connection and a vibrant, trust-rich community within an organization.

3. Culture doesn’t form inside routine meetings.
What truly forms culture are the extracurriculars: training and training trips, employee resource groups, drinks out, conferences etc., which are difficult to replicate in our new virtual reality. Just like parents have struggled with the recent loss of their children’s sports and music classes, organizational culture-builders are feeling the effects of these disrupted practices (and the fact that even Zoom trivia-night doesn’t suffice). A recent HR Executive article lists the top three signs 2022 remote culture isn’t working as low meeting engagement, siloed departments and poor employee communication. Psychology Today claims that “virtual communication will never replace face-to-face communication.” But here comes the crisitunity: the silver lining is our chance to reinvent these important connection practices, intentionally, with more impact, equity and inclusiveness. The same Psychology Today article predicts that in 2022, organizations will “invest in technology that allows virtual or hybrid employees to get to know each other better,” exactly what we’re working on with our partners. 

“Communities are like concentric circles, with highly engaged people at the heart working on them full-time, and more peripheral members at the edges, involved as they want to be“

In summary: Culture isn’t merely top-down driven and involved with getting work done; it’s actually found in the margins, in the communities that form. The best of these communities are organic and fluid; their borders are porous, so it’s easier to think about including part-timers, vendors, customers, even former employees. Communities are like concentric circles, with highly engaged people at the heart working on them full-time, and more peripheral members at the edges, involved as they want to be. They are held together by shared beliefs and human connection, not paychecks and reporting lines. We inherently recognize that communities are tied to our identities, and we feel the gravity of other humans holding us to community standards, ideals, and behaviors. 

There are different kinds of communities, and I am most interested in what I call a “learning community” because I see a knowledge-economy company as a learning machine; as leaders grapple with the shortcomings of their cultures and look for ways to build a community layer, “learning communities” provide a useful framework. 

Lots of people are working on this type of community building: shout out to www.connectedcommons.com for their powerful research on learning communities in companies. I recently had the privilege of discussing this with new Connected Commons hire Greg Pryor, on a shiny beach morning in LaJolla, CA; it was his last day at Workday, and he was on his way to join Rob Cross at Connected Commons. After years of being in the heart of cutting-edge HR practices, Greg has concluded that learning communities are the most important and impactful area of work for his next chapter. Michael Arena, also at Connected Commons, wrote a great book, Adaptive Space, which is full of stories and data about the power of “social capital strategies.”

This need to change workplace culture through community building is fueling our growth at Circles, with partners like Glassdoor calling us their “work from home strategy.” Our shared vision with Glassdoor is to use the Circles platform and methodology to help reinforce and scale valued aspects of their culture, like inclusion, teamwork, resilience, and human connection. To highlight another of our partners: Dupont’s M&M division recently scaled up their Circles program, to strengthen their community in the face of the major changes 2022 will bring.

Our ongoing work with Circl.es partners gives me new insights every day into the cultural power of learning communities. Much of our work now is figuring out exactly what it means to build these communities at work. What’s clear is that community has an important place in the culture conversation, and getting it right has all the same commercial benefits that come from other aspects of organizational health.

Interested to connect and talk more?

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Is Your New Year Powered by a Learning Community?

: Dan Hoffman

Every January, humans make (and sometimes break) New Year’s resolutions. Much has been written on how to master the process, everything from discerning and focusing on your why, to turning when into actionable calendar items. Results vary as we engage the hard work of change in our personal and professional lives. At Circl.es, our work focuses on an overlooked but powerful dimension of change, one that might not emerge as readily when making resolutions: the who. How does one’s community augment not only personal growth á la annual resolutions, but also noticeable change in the workplace?

Our clients have experienced the transformation that happens when employees connect and grow together in small groups. Head of Platform at Union Square Ventures, Lauren Young, knows there’s no curriculum robust enough to keep up with the challenges facing executives in USV’s fast-growing portfolio: it’s not necessarily what those leaders need, but who–they need community with each other. As she puts it, “Leaders working at rapidly growing companies are constantly facing challenges that require a quick decision or response. One way we try to support leaders within our portfolio is by connecting them with peers who either have gone through that experience, or can provide a safe space to discuss and brainstorm ways to approach it.”

“Great leaders don’t move people around a board like pawns;
they cultivate conditions for growth”

Lauren practices what General Stan McChrystal refers to as the difference between  “gardening” and “playing chess.” Great leaders don’t move people around a board like pawns; they cultivate conditions for growth. In his video The Leader as Gardener, McChrystal expands the metaphor: “A gardener grows nothing, plants do that–that’s what plants are designed to do, and they’re really good at it. But the gardener’s role is not unimportant…all the things the gardener does to create an environment and ecosystem allows the plants to do what they do, and do it very, very well.” Like plants, humans naturally circle and grow together, provided leaders present the right conditions.

When the pandemic deprived leaders of offices, campuses, and hotel event spaces, it forced intentionality and creativity as they grappled with how to create garden-like spaces where employees can gather and flourish. Priya Parker, in her book The Art of Gathering, discusses the sin of being a “chill” host at a party, “Chill is a miserable attitude when it comes to hosting gatherings … I want to convince you to assume your proper powers as a host.” Thoughtful hosts decide who needs to connect with whom, and with a little forethought, what topics they should discuss. Like a good party host, organizational leaders can use small groups to set the stage for deep connection. Fortuitously, this combats pandemic realities like disconnection, disengagement and loneliness.

“Like a good party host, organizational leaders can use small groups to set the stage for deep connection.”

Leaders increasingly look for learning groups for themselves, many joining professional cross-company learning communities that connect them with others working on similar projects. Despite limited ability to gather in-person, our clients like YPO and Executive Networks reported record growth and renewals this year. New communities like Atlas One for sales professionals and Round for technology leaders emerged. Ryan Fuller, CEO of Round, says that “A vetted community rich with perspective and grounded in shared values provides unparalleled access to knowledge and opportunities from fellow members dedicated to helping each other.”  Degreed upskilling platform has documented this shift from internal connection to connecting professionally between organizations–their data revealed that 62% of executives sought to learn from professional networks in 2019, and we believe the pandemic has accelerated this trend.

This movement is consistent with an approach known as communities of practice, a term Ettiene Wenger-Traynor coined while studying the ancient system of apprenticeship. His studies informed him that many have long misunderstood the role of an apprentice’s master: traditionally, apprentices actually spent very little one-on-one time with masters–like the plants in McChrystal’s garden, apprentices mostly learned from each other. As we heard him say in a recent workshop: “finding the knowledge we need to solve today’s problems starts with coming together in uncertainty and figuring it out. We even saw university presidents form peer groups to figure out Covid.” 

Those of us who have taken a class from an expert or read a book alone have experienced the absence of such a community; we emerge swamped with expertise, yet starved for the practice and peer support that produces true change. Many leaders we work with also describe falling into another trap: while they may successfully group employees or community members together through directories, social media groups, and email newsletters, the results have been lackluster. As pointed out by Gina Bianchini–founder of the community management platform Mighty Networks–these large, flat groups are truly social media–that is, one-way communication that most of us passively consume, making it the junk food of human connection. Actual conversation and connection are vital to transformational small group communities.

“Actual conversation and connection are vital to transformational small group communities.”

In contrast, our partners are proving that small groups, like circles, elevate a community into a learning community, facilitating authentic connections and enabling social learning. The recipe is clear: gather a diverse cross-section of people with a common purpose.  Foster a safe place. Watch as the power of peer connection pressures action, and taps into another great need–the desire to serve something beyond themselves. At this point, the community benefits just as much as the individual, as shared trust and vision compels greater job longevity and performance.  

As February nears and we distill our lists of resolutions–some fade, and the right ones will inevitably rise to the top and stick–consider adding to your list of resolutions something that focuses not on why or how, but on who. Will we actively host our parties, tending the gardens of our companies and communities? We can not only improve the chances of seeing our own resolutions through; we can help create spaces and learning communities where others can thrive and become their fullest selves. 

We’re here to connect with you.

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Virtual hugs,
Dan
CEO, Circl.es

Interested in becoming a part of the Circl.es team? Check out our open roles.

Show Up, and Open Up

: Circles Team

Show up, and open up. It may sound simplistic, but that’s basically the recipe at Circles.

The guided peer groups we run help you explore the challenges you face in life, both personally and professionally, by tapping into what amounts to a universal experience.

“As long as there have been people on this earth, they’ve sat in a circle,” says Jonathan Hefter, the chief guide at Circles. “We’re simply doing it with some great technology and an agenda and a really clear mission.”

Jonathan has spent more than 20 years in business training and learning, drawing on a right-brain, left-brain mix of operations experience and creative peer facilitation. He rattles off the tenets of Circles with an obvious passion, exuding a belief that he’s helping the world become a better place one video conference call at a time.

But he makes it clear that a circle is much more than a conference call. It’s a community, and it’s his job to make sure the people in that community feel safe enough to open up. 

Jonathan, who worked for Circles founder Dan Hoffman years ago, has plenty of experience getting people to open up. He runs wilderness experiences and men’s retreats in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, where men from various backgrounds can sit in a circle and talk about their deepest troubles. Jonathan is now successfully implementing this approach to Circles with one key difference, the technology.

The human element is still at the core of circles meetings though. The key, as Jonathan puts it, is to create a safe space where people can feel like they’re able to share. Just don’t call it group therapy.

“It’s not therapy,” he says. “It’s therapeutic.”

The secret to a great circle is having deeper conversations than most people are used to having at work. People need to feel they are in a psychological space where they can be vulnerable, and vulnerability is crucial to people feeling like they can go deep.

So, how does he do it? One way is by establishing norms, like ensuring each participant starts the circle being willing to open up. Another is ensuring that they cut right to the chase. In the first meeting, for instance, participants don’t go around the circle spouting off their resumes.

“I’d much rather hear about the last time when a deep, meaningful conversation happened in your life,” Jonathan says. “Or, better yet, why are you interested in Circles? Tell me what you want to get out of this.”

The potential number of answers is infinite, and the circle organically follows the discussion where it needs to go, while the guide, and the meeting platform’s timer feature, makes sure everyone gets equal air time.

Granted, Jonathan might not be your guide. But he knows how to pick them, and he has come up with a training program to make sure every guide can help every member get the most out of each circle.

The guides come from a variety of backgrounds — former coaches, a school administrator, a theater teacher — but the standout trait they all share is fundamental for Circles; knowing how to hold space. What that means is, Jonathan can train them on how to keep the circle on track and enforce the norms that have been established. But they all know how to speak from the heart and they all know how to tell a story. They keyword here is empathy. Importantly, they also know how to encourage others to do the same.

Because at its heart, Circles is about how the shared experiences of others can help make your life better. That means sharing stories, not advice. Studies show that sharing your challenge and how you worked through it will be more valuable than any traditional advice you can give someone.

“The question is how do we bring this into corporate America,” Jonathan says. “We have to tap into what all humans want. You want to belong, you want to know you’re not alone. You want safe spaces to get what you need so you don’t go home and pull your hair out.”

For more on how to not go home and yank at your hair, check out how Circles can get you together with your own personal advisory board.

“We all have something to learn, and everyone can teach you something,” Jonathan says. “Your life can be an endless journey of learning. And it’s supposed to be fun.”

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