The Art Of Collaboration Articles

What happens when two Silicon Valley darlings set their minds to creating the world’s most high-performing team? At age 34, Justin Rosenstein has already had more cultural impact than most of us can hope for in a lifetime. In his first job out of Stanford as a product manager at Google, he invented and wrote the original prototype for Gchat in a single overnight coding push.

Recently I spoke at Chicago Ideas Week, where I distilled some of the best advice I have after ten years of studying and leading teams. We’re excited to share the video.

Asana receives a lot of recognition for its business success, culture, and employee engagement. As the company enters a phase of intense growth, I’ve been considering what will be required to continue this success, and put together an internal memo of “Things I’ve found to be helpful.”

Tech culture has the reputation for long hours, intense competition, and little time for reflection. But Asana, a workplace-productivity management company founded by former Facebookers and Googlers, couldn’t be further from this stereotype.

Nearly a decade ago, Zuck’s college roommate became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire by moving fast and breaking things. Now Moskovitz is set to take his radically chiller cloud standout Asana — a software success story powered by patience and the pandemic — public.

You don’t have to buy into the value of Eastern wisdom traditions or care that much about employees’ emotional well-being to think there’s something to the Asana way. Rosenstein and Moskovitz are happy to stake the company’s results as proof. “Over time, more and more companies will just start to look this way and it won’t seem unusual,” Rosenstein says. “People will discover that it’s just more effective.”

Obscured in the valuation dust of the current unicorn stampede is a key question: What actually makes a great company great? What do the future Facebooks, Googles and Apples have in common — not to mention the current ones?

Mindfulness is a core component of how we work with our clients, and while many studies have confirmed the importance of it for increasing focus, reducing stress, and improving general well-being, many in the tech industry have yet to integrate a regular mindfulness practice into their lives.

For Asana cofounders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, mindfulness means embracing the inhale and the exhale of the workday–and getting beyond an obsession with productivity.

I procrastinate. But it’s not because I’m lazy. I procrastinate because something about my highest-priority task makes me subtly (or not-so-subtly) uncomfortable. Fortunately, I’ve found an indispensable three-step process for reliably moving from procrastination to action:

When Asana was a young company of just a few people, we experienced a phenomenon that’s common with early-stage startups. Just about every day, someone would come to work with a new idea. (A good idea, no less!) Most of the time, we said, “let’s do it.” Until we got distracted by the next new idea.

At Asana, we aspire to an unusual level of empowerment, where everyone is autonomous in their role in accomplishing our company’s mission. This approach comes with challenges, but we believe they’re worth it, because it leads to better outcomes faster.

Last summer, I was attending a conference where I met an up-and-coming entrepreneur. We got into a conversation about building teams when she began bemoaning a situation she had with one of her reports, where he came to her and said, “I think we need a culture committee.”

When HBR asked 550 CEOs what factors were most likely to bring them business success in the next year, employee engagement ranked in the top three, above ability to innovate and even sales and marketing.

Over years of iteration and sink-or-swim learning, we’ve developed four principles for assembling a world-class team. We have an unconventional approach to growing Asana: instead of hiring quickly, we carefully woo those rare people who are among the best in the world at what they do, or who we believe have the potential to grow into the best.

Doing great things takes more than a great vision and a great team, it takes great execution, down to the nuts and bolts of day-to-day organization.

Ever feel overburdened by communication and meetings? This has been a problem at every company we’ve worked at… or heard of. Some of it inevitably comes with scale, but much of it is wasteful. In a recent company-wide survey in which we asked, “What are the biggest drains on your energy?”, the top-ranked answer was “Communication.”