Connection is Key

Leadership, in its essence, is about connection. Create this bond with your team, and they will work harder for you, longer for you, and will take risks they wouldn’t otherwise take. Numerous studies show connected leaders enjoy markedly low employee turnover and markedly high team productivity. But how do we connect with our teams in our increasingly disconnected workspaces? Tim Cadogan, CEO of GoFundMe, says it comes down to building community in three specific ways.

When Cadogan joined GoFundMe in March 2020, the WHO was days away from declaring COVID-19 a global pandemic. “We had to transition very quickly,” Cadogan says, “and by the end of my first week, we said, ‘We’re going to go fully distributed.’” Faced with the multiple imperatives of getting to know his new team while simultaneously helping them adjust to a new working environment and increased demand on the GoFundMe platform, Cadogan immediately put three connective approaches into action:

1. Ask for help - Coming from an economics background, Cadogan earned his executive stripes pioneering advertising technology for OpenX and Yahoo, and by consulting with business management giants McKinsey and The Boston Consulting Group. “I found it intimidating to learn a completely new business,” he says. “I came from a very different sector, so I needed to learn a new business, a new company, and a new set of people at a time in which the usage of that product and system was going up massively.” Rather than trying to learn everything on his own, and risking missing vital information, Cadogan immediately turned to the experts: his employees. He set up what he calls an “open-source learning curriculum,” then asked experts within each team to help him understand the specifics of their departments, and how he could best support them. What resulted was a thriving online knowledge base, which both deepened Cadogan’s understanding of the different teams working within GoFundMe, and communicated his respect for their contribution and expertise.   
2. Create avenues for collaboration - With the entirety of his workforce newly telecommuting, Cadogan knew he needed to create operational changes to ensure GoFundMe would continue operating efficiently. “Typically, when you do that in a company,” he says, “you take the time to get to know people… then you work thorough those situations in a room where you can kind of read people’s body language… This format [Zoom] isn’t so great at nonverbal communication.” Whenever a decision or change needs to be made, Cadogan creates a Google Doc which contains everything he knows about the issue, his ideas and opinions on the appropriate next steps, and his basis for arriving at his conclusions. He then sends the doc to every leader involved in the decision and asks them to push back on his ideas, add their own thoughts, and present alternate solutions. Cadogan considers the doc and decision final when there is group consensus, which he terms, “shared mind," and he has found this collaborative approach leads to organizational change with very little (if any) pushback.   
3. Take time to be together - With “water cooler” bonding temporarily on hold, Cadogan built weekly online town hall meetings into the schedule. Employees were invited to come together to talk through current events, share their personal stories, seek and provide advice on navigating the new reality of the workplace, and talk about anything else on their minds. Cadogan attended these meetings, got to know his employees, and always ended with a very important question: “How can I help?” What resulted was a business culture that drew closer together during a time when they were more physically separated than ever before.
   

Today, while both resignations and job openings are at record highs, leaders who know how to connect with their people will always enjoy a more stable, productive work environment. “Life happens,” Cadogan says. “A fundamental part of being human is wanting to get through it together.”          
 
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