Culture Carriers in Dublin
Doing the job in Dublin. Starting with Hanni. Finding a fridge. Fitting into life.
How long does it take to move to a new city in a new country and then start to feel like you can get going? How long until you’ve found some housing, a grocery store to frequent, a decent coffee shop, a few routes around the neighbourhood?
I had two weeks. It felt like both too much time and not enough. Too much in the sense that the world kept spinning and deals kept dealing and Slack kept growing. Not enough in the sense that we didn’t really have our housing sorted out nevermind any containers for leftovers or a sleep routine. But I was itchy to get started. We had an office space. We had to make it work.
So we did. Instead of the kitchen table at our Airbnb, I took my computer on a Dublin Bike to our offices in the Guinness Storehouse, and worked from there. It was a weird kind of world to live in. We weren’t travellers any more, but we were still living like travellers. I had lots of work to do for Slack, some keeping up the prior role I’d had in Vancouver, some trying to figure out the new role in Dublin.
And it all felt like being in a wind tunnel. Anything that I didn’t hold onto tightly got blown away. And I didn’t know what needed to get held onto tightly. But I did know I had to pare things down.
The team in Vancouver? They were terrific and could run themselves. The customers I had been working with? Unless they were in our newly created (but, erm, still just really being created) EMEA region, they could work with our Vancouver or SF teams.
I shed responsibilities and refocused. I declined meetings. I was in Dublin to do a job. Now I needed to do it. But what was that job?
Finding That New Job
The first few folks to land from a company opening up in Dublin were often called the “Culture Carriers.” I heard this phrase many times from the IDA Ireland folks and the leaders of established companies I met in Dublin. The Culture Carriers were sent from the mothership to be the first boots on the ground.
Culture Carriers had official job titles and lists of responsibilities that defined what they did in tidy ways that sounded typical for tech companies. They did Sales, Marketing, HR, Finance. But they also had to solve a broad range of problems beyond their job descriptions.
If they did Customer Service they had to be responsible for their daily tasks — answering customer inquiries and resetting passwords and sharing onboarding guidance — and then they might need to hit the Ikea to pick up desks and chairs for three new employees starting Monday.
Culture Carriers had to be entrepreneurial and inventive. They had to improvise and figure things out in new ways, while also maintaining some connection to the broader organization and the overall ways it expected things to be done. They were translators — the humans that smoothed out and made the rough edges of the organization connect to the rough edges of its new location. The Culture Carriers for Slack in Dublin started out as me and Hanni.
I first met Hanni after we’d landed, once in Dublin with my family, when we started to set up the office. Hanni radiated an almost incandescent energy. She was English, of course. Her accent was posh too, of course. Her mannerisms with her glasses and hair flips and hand gestures could have been distracting if I wasn’t just trying to keep up with the pace of her words.
Carrying on a conversation with Hanni felt like being on a pogo stick on a trampoline — quick slashes of comment and wit ricocheting off in all directions. I was just trying to keep upright. After a full day of Slack, Hanni went home and strapped herself onto her Concept 2 rowing machine to burn off the last calories of her day. She was brilliant in every sense, often many of them at once.
As the Culture Carriers for Slack, Hanni and I needed to quickly form a work relationship that could respond to the somewhat opaque future we were trying to create. We were the adults on this camping trip who needed to make some decisions and needed to get along. We were learning together. Mostly this was very good in fairly unknown conditions. Sometimes this was not smooth.
The Fridge Incident
By the time we had somewhere in the neighbourhood of 10 employees at Slack Dublin, our office’s lack of a fridge became a sore point for folks. No one wanted to go out for lunch every day. They wanted to bring their lunch. Plus, the company-provided drinks needed to be kept cold.
But buying a fridge seemed daunting, near impossible. Neither Hanni or I had a car. Neither of us was from Dublin and could call on an uncle with a truck or van. Neither of us even knew where to buy a fridge since our respective homes had come furnished. We fruitlessly searched the ‘dot-i-e’ (Ireland’s official top-level domain name / Internet country code) appliance retailers. None had inventories online or offered e-commerce purchase and delivery.
When would we get a fridge? How could we get a fridge? How big should we make our fridge? We procrastinated on the fridge. It felt hard and it haunted the office like a missing tooth.
At a certain point the lack of a fridge became something that needed to be figured out. It felt embarrassing how shittily we’d done in getting ourselves a fridge. So one day, it had to be done: now.
Hanni did it. She spent a day renting a van, finding a place to buy a fridge, buying a fridge, loading up the fridge, navigating the stone steps and tile passageways of our warehouse office with a hand cart and finally delivering the prodigal fridge to the office. She plugged it in. It hummed to life, empty and lit from its single bare bulb.
I remember the day because as I was leaving for home, after spending the day working with customers and training my team and interviewing prospective new employment candidates and doing all the things that were in my job description, Hanni and a few of her team showed up with the van and the fridge and the handcart. They had done the work that was needed but did not appear on their respective job descriptions.
Together we moved the fridge in and together we certainly enjoyed it once it arrived. But the Fridge Incident did provide some friction between Hanni and me. Hanni had come through for her people. She had done the extra work not on the job description. I had not. I still regret this.
In reflection now, I can see what I couldn’t see at the time — that I could have done a better job being proactive and fixing the problems other people saw as problems. But I’m not always great at seeing what other people see as problems. I’d prefer to just focus on getting the work done, and ignore the things outside the work that can influence its getting doneness. Hanni was terrific for taking a more expansive view and solving broader problems.
The upside of the Fridge Incident is that it proved to be a good instigating issue. Hanni and I started to have a weekly meeting of what we called grandiosely the “Dublin leadership.” There were two of us.
Topics that I remember included things like:
Employee safety walking to work through The Liberties
Incorporating Slack’s Values into the Dublin office
Building our profile in Dublin for hiring
Giant beanbag chairs — for napping or not?
Finding out how was it possible the recruiters were charging us so much for such mediocre candidates
Seeking out more new candidates to hire
How do sound insulate meeting rooms so everyone isn’t privy to every conversation in them?
Setting up new employees so they were excellent and onboarded and at full capability
Meeting the plans for the office and the demand from customers
Creating the plans for the office and the demand from customers
Many times we flailed about trying to figure out what to do, in what order. We were in that classic bind of doing something for the first time — at once doing it and figuring out how to do it.
The Work of Carrying Culture
Looking back I realize that the sheer amount of newness in my life at that point of time felt pretty overwhelming. It created the wind tunnel effect. New city. New job. New commute. Lots of new for me and for my family and no childcare arrangement.
I’d jumped in to Dublin life with my clothes on and my bags packed and I was drowning just a little bit. Taking on another small job like getting a fridge seemed like something that could be pushed off, then pushed off again. And I suppose it could, until it couldn’t. That day came and Hanni stepped up to deal with it and I can’t remember if I told her then or not, but I appreciate it and I appreciated her.
Together we tried to build a Slack office in Dublin. We took the written bits of Slack culture and shared them. We took the unwritten bits but expressed parts of Slack culture and tried to model these in action for others. We coached and talked about what it meant to work at Slack.
I think the biggest challenge we consistently faced was how to reconcile and join what was assumed as global Slack culture (because it was what came from SF, because it was all that had been created to that point in time) with local Slack culture. The centre continued to be the SF office. It set the pace for the company and we all reported back to SF. But we also had to create something in Dublin that was new and different.
It took some time to see that — that we had to create something new and different. But once we decided to go for it we found our people in Dublin were craving the chance to create their own localized version of Slack. Could we create our own version of Slack culture? We didn’t really ask, we just got started.
We created Slack pint glassed to pour tins of Guinness into, frosty from the fridge. A group of folks painted a tree on a white wall of the office, with branches reaching up to hold the 6 Slack values. (On seeing the end result, you’d never guess that a bit of spackle was needed to correct the misspelling of Craftsmanship.) Those small bits of belonging began as unique to us and people wanted more.
The consistent challenge, for those of us Culture Carriers, was to understand what was possible locally, and what was not. Where could we make decisions for ourselves and where did we need to be consistent with HQ?
I started to use the word remit because everyone else in Dublin used it and it seemed to better describe what we had to do. I started to understand that I had an official remit and an unofficial remit.
The official remit was the job description. The unofficial remit was whatever it took to make Slack Dublin succeed — deciding to go to Thanksgiving at the US Embassy when invited to meet other company leaders, meeting with executives to start a list of candidates to replace me, speaking on a panel in London at a tech conference, keeping in touch with IDA Ireland for guidance.
None of these tasks were on my job description but it was as much a part of the job as the hiring and managing of my team. The role I found myself in felt very much like a “yes, and…” role. I needed to be open to all the things that needed to get done. I needed to learn on the job. I needed to remember that even in a wind tunnel I had to hold on to the essential things.
And that’s all even before we officially launched Slack in Europe.
Up next — Just Like Starting Over: Launching in Dublin. What is Slack, again? Telling our story from scratch. Flying to find the complexities of Europe.