GEORGE POLZER, CONT’D

Even salary is an afterthought for these individuals. From my experience, talented people will stay around for as long as you have interesting problems for them to chew on and solve.

Another aspect of my leadership approach is the way we work together in this company. It’s much less about different levels for leaders and employees, and more about being on an even level where we all work together on interesting problems. Despite this partnership model, some traditional tools also work very well for us. For example, we’ve embraced things like Objectives and Key Results (OKRS) and bi-annual performance reviews. Google is a big proponent of OKRS, which enable company-wide objectives and key results to trickle down and become part of every team and individual’s objectives. It’s totally transparent: employees can see each others’ reviews. This has been a very powerful tool for us to facilitate accountability and transparency around where we are headed, and how that connects to each person’s goals.

My mantra is, ‘only implement as much structure and organization as is necessary’. The question of how much leadership vs. how much management you require is very much determined by the product or service you offer. We’re not building games or websites here; our product is a software that sits in high-security data centres — and that means we have to be much more diligent than the average tech startup. At Google, there is this sense of, “Let’s put a beta product out there and let people try it out; if it fails, no problem!” But when Teralytics ships a piece of software to a high-security data centre, every piece of code has to work from day one. Changing that mindset in our people has required balancing some more traditional management tools alongside the newer idea of working as partners.