Work Together Beautifully
I struggle to explain my role at Treatwell in a few words. I lead an exceptional group of Agile Coaches, who work with our product development teams on their never-ending continuous improvement journey. I also get involved with things like our Tech at Treatwell brand, community engagement, recruitment, team happiness and retention, learning and development, organisational design, our graduate scheme and much more, and I work closely with our CTO, Simon, every day. And then I do a lot of stuff outside Tech. Whether mentoring or coaching other team members, helping out the Exec team when they need me or leading on initiatives like the creation and rollout of the latest version of Treatwell’s company values. Funnily enough, one of our new values describes exactly how I see my mission here at Treatwell. I promise I didn’t hack the values workshops to make it so! Happily, Treatwellers seem to value the thing I am here to do.
That value is “Work Together Beautifully”. My job is to help people work together beautifully. We believe deeply in the power and importance of collaborating brilliantly. Of course, I doubt there is an organisation that would claim not to value people working together, but collaborating with others is so deeply ingrained in our DNA that I believe lone wolf types would find it very tough to succeed at Treatwell. Simply working together isn’t good enough for us. We believe that for this to be a meaningful value, we need to routinely collaborate exceptionally well. Beautifully! We dream big at Treatwell. We’re transforming the hair and beauty industry, bringing it online, and we’re changing the behaviour of both consumers and our partner salons. This isn’t possible without a shared mission and goals, and a burning desire to work together to achieve them.
This strongly held value presents itself in lots of interesting ways. Perhaps the most obvious, is that we relish and excel at cross-team and cross-functional work. Most of the business outcomes we are seeking to deliver require work from different people — with different skills, often “sitting” in different parts of the organisation. This fundamental truth for pretty much every company I have ever encountered seems to cause a lot of head scratching for the vast majority of them. There are lots of structured methodologies and radical approaches for addressing this, but at Treatwell we just seem to like helping each other, and learning from each other, and we’re very good at it. We treat each other with kindness, respect and trust.
Let me give you a couple of recent examples. When COVID-19 hit, our industry was in turmoil. Our partner salons were faced with an unprecedented catastrophe and, of course, our attention turned to helping in any way we could. We had to transition from building a marketplace to helping to save an industry, and this meant doing things we’d never done before. And at every turn our instinct was to collaborate, and help each other. We quickly and collectively developed laser focus on a new set of goals. We seamlessly moved to communicating with each other much more frequently, which was not straightforward as we were all suddenly and unexpectedly working from home. And there were countless examples of people signing up for tasks outside their usual remit, including more team members taking on leadership activities. In fact, in my four years at Treatwell, I have never heard anyone say “sorry, that’s not my job” and I certainly can’t say that about every company I have worked for.
Secondly, a smaller example, but one very close to my heart. We care a lot about growth, learning and development but we also recognise that we can do a lot better in this area. Our People team are rising to this challenge ably assisted by some expert Agile Coaches. These two teams have formed an unlikely, but incredibly effective and lasting partnership, collaborating on lots of exciting initiatives to help people develop and grow at Treatwell.
I believe the keys to our success in working together are actually very simple. Firstly, and most importantly, we are very careful about the types of people we hire. If you don’t like working with others, or you need very static responsibilities with clear boundaries, this probably isn’t the place for you. Secondly, we resist hierarchy. We create mechanisms for people to connect with each other without the friction of “going through management”. Working together is easy and natural because we make sure nothing gets in people’s way. Thirdly, where we do have people with leadership responsibility, they act as role models. Our Exec team are different people, with different skills, interests and backgrounds but, whilst I know they have their moments, they really do collaborate very closely, day in day out. And lastly, we celebrate collaboration and call out the results we achieve together. We make sure people feel good when they work together. Beautifully.
Like all good values, working together beautifully manifests itself via a number of habits. Things that become second nature. Whether it is getting peer feedback on a bit of work, or offering to lend a hand to someone who is struggling. Whether it is showing curiosity about what is going on in another part of the business, or seeking to broaden your skills so that you can do more. Of course, like all good company values, this is mostly reality with a little bit of aspiration. We know we can always do better and do more but, with the team we have, I am confident we can continue to work together, ever more beautifully.
