The Alma philosophy
We believe that work should be much more than something you do for a living. Work should not only be interesting and exciting, but more importantly it should help you grow as a professional and as a person. Mastering your job’s hard skills (how to code for an engineer, how to sell for a salesperson, etc.) is of course indispensable, but so is mastering communication and leadership, especially in a high-growth company.
Why we care about leadership (and why you should, too)
At its core, leadership is about getting people to do something because they want to. This is very similar to the concept of traction in a startup: people work with much more enthusiasm when they genuinely believe in the direction than when they’re simply told what to do. That leverage enables strong leaders to have more impact, more easily.
For example, since the early days our view that commerce should be a source of progress and those small companies deserved the same tools as large ones were shared by many people outside Alma. As a result, many people outside the company (some even working at a competitor) have been helping us (talking about Alma publicly, referring leads etc.), not because we asked them to but because they believed in our vision. Little effort, big results.
As you can see in the example above, leadership is not management - you don’t need to be the boss to be a leader!
Alma helps you discover your leadership style
To quote Captain Obvious, everyone is different. So it makes no sense to expect everyone to behave in the same way, and to be the same kind of leader. More than copy-pasting someone else’s behaviour we believe that everyone should work to discover their leadership style, to understand what works best for them and the people they work with.
While too many rules destroy individual initiative and prevent progress, it is hard to improve without guidance. We believe that Alma should help everyone on this journey by providing:
Frameworks and tools
There are tools out there that have been iterated on by many people and can save you a lot of time, such as the Leadership and Communication Principles we share below, but also career paths (and what is expected in terms of leadership at every level) and 360 feedbacks.
Perspectives and insights
Help everyone broaden their horizon, realize they can become much more than what they are, realize that limits are largely self-imposed. Many ways to do this in particular inviting extraordinary people to speak in front of the team and sharing interesting articles.
Trainings
We learn better by doing and Alma-stamped trainings are a good starting point.
Learning never stops
Ultimately, nobody can force you to improve but yourself. You can look at other Almakers for inspiration, you can read the frameworks and take the trainings, but you need to be in a growth mindset, always aiming to learn and improve. We do not ask for everyone to be that obsessive but the more senior the position, the higher the expectations especially in terms of leadership and communication.
This is the spirit in which we wrote these Leadership and Communication Principles: a set of principles that are easy to understand yet very powerful. A guide that not only shows you the north star, but also helps you along the way. Each of these principles touches upon one idea and one idea only (that’s why the list is long!). They are easy to remember, easy to test a candidate, easy to use to give feedback to a colleague (e.g. “in this situation you could have done a better job leading from the front”) … or to yourself.