How Slack Built its Culture: Part 1

Starting to define our culture with Four Slack Attributes. Learning what it means to be "Slacky". Finding a range of reactions.

Stewart started to be a stranger to those of us at Slack in Vancouver. Oh, he was still the same micromanaging and humane maniac. He just started spending more weeks in SF than in Vancouver.

Slack was growing very quickly. How could we bring on the right people, get them started the right way and set them up for success with a mix of the lessons we’d already learned and ways we aspired to work together? Yes, those were the key questions.

Scott Schiller in the forest of desk chairs that would eventually find homes at desks and butts to support at Slack. This was how quickly we added people.

The first attempt to answer what it means to be a good member of the Slack team was the creation of our Attributes. It was meant to answer the consistent question: how should I show up for me and my teammates to be successful?

Four Slack Attributes

I remember the day the Four Slack Attributes came out. I’d heard about it and been asked to contribute to an early version in a few meetings. My input had gone into the process, then the general communication arrived to me in Slack just like it arrived to everyone at Slack.

I opened the Google Slides presentation. It had 5 slides including the title slide: Four Slack Attributes. Each following slide was a single attribute. Each attribute is captured below exactly as it appeared then and there to all Slack employees, bold passages copied verbatim.

It was our attempt to capture what it meant to be part of Slack. It proved to be only our first attempt to capture what it meant to be part of Slack.

But without further pre-amble, the Four Slack Attributes, in the order they arrived.

Smart

This is not IQ. What makes someone smart is a desire to keep learning. You want to be curious, inventive and creative; you want to always be improving.

To make that easier, seek out opportunities to operationalize work and, where possible, simplify down to checklist-driven routines. Adopt best practices wherever you find them.

Doing so allows you to spend more of your cognitive energy on those things which are unexpected or unpredictable, unique to the situation, or which most require your intelligence and creativity. It also allows you to keep a critical eye on both the process and the objectives, to ensure you are making the best use of your time.

Humble

Humility is a prerequisite for almost everything good in life: joy, satisfaction, and authentic connection with others. It is also a prerequisite for the self-awareness that enables learning and personal development.

We want to win hearts. We also want to recognize the humanity in our customers and demonstrate that recognition in everything we do. That’s impossible to do from a me-first, self-centered place. You need to put others first and have great instincts for hospitality.

If we all give more than we take, we all end up with more. (Straight game theory, yo.) Cultivating humility enables empathy and allows us to operate with respect, kindness and solidarity.

Also, as a bonus, if you are humble, people want you to succeed :)

Hardworking

You are expected to be focused, disciplined, and professional at work. That doesn’t mean being dour, and it doesn’t mean being serious all the time.

In the best case it is actually joyful: there is an exhilaration you experience in bursts of high-impact productivity that you can’t really find anywhere else. Success feels good. Winning feels good. Accomplishment feels good.

Be competitive, determined, resourceful, resilient and gritty. Take this job as an opportunity to do the best work of your life. Play with your whole heart. Feel the urgency of the opportunities before us, and remember every day counts. We were lucky enough to get this one-in-a-million shot. Live up to it.

Collaborative

In the best case, the output of a team far exceeds the sum of all the individual team members’ strengths. On the highest functioning teams, people multiply each other’s strengths. The worst teams, in contrast, drag themselves down to the level of each other’s biggest weaknesses. You know what kind of team you want to play on.

Being collaborative doesn’t mean being deferential or submissive. It means demonstrating leadership wherever you can. Everyone is responsible for the health of the team: clearing up problems as they arise, maintaining high levels of trust, driving alignment, and ensuring that communication is clear and direct is part of your job.

The difference in outcomes over the next decade will be determined by how well we work together. The success of your team is essential to your personal success. So be the change you want to see in the world.

Being “Slacky”

So those are them, the Four Slack Attributes we wanted each person to strive towards. What do you think?

(Seriously. If you’re trying to learn from Slack’s story, take a moment here and jot down your reactions to the Four Slack Attributes. The words to come can wait. Here’s a photo of Slacky colours.)

(Okay, onwards!)

When the Attributes presentation came out I’m sure an All Hands meeting happened quickly thereafter to accompany it. Likely even the same day.

In reading the Four Slack Attributes I remember I did a lot of nodding. It all felt right to me and reflective of the place and people and time. I felt like it was actually a really masterful piece of internal communication — a really hard job to get right. (Also, one of those kinds of thankless jobs that no one really notices if it goes well and no one would notice anything but if it had gone poorly.)

The Four Slack Attributes was our first attempt to write down and standardize what it meant to work at Slack. A bit self-consciously, at first, people started to talk about something being “Slacky” or not. Some navel gazing had begun.

What folks meant by “Slacky” seemed to be that either something aligned and agreed with the Attributes, or not. A lot of interpretation and inferring happened.

Reading the Four Slack Attributes again now, they seem both hopeful and hopeless; timeless and very specifically rooted in their time. Naive, if I’m being critical. Full of trust, if I’m being generous.

And that range of reactions and need for interpretation and inference showed the limitations of the Four Slack Attributes. To those of us who had been at Slack and seen its evolution, they codified what we already practiced. To those just joining Slack, they kind of mystified. They didn’t do their job of answering the question: how should I show up for me and my teammates to be successful?

So, we hadn’t answered the key question we set out to tackle for new people to Slack. More change needed to happen and more change awaited right around the corner.

Up next — How Slack Built its Culture, Part 2: Shifting to 6 Slack values. Creating canonical stories for each value. Onboarding as a force multiplier.