But no matter the discipline, the question was the same:

How do I do this the SuperFriendly way?

They weren’t asking me how to illustrate or write code or produce. They were asking me how a SuperFriend illustrates, writes code, or produces.

“Follow your instincts”

I didn’t have an answer. When I started SuperFriendly and did the work myself, I never asked that question. I just followed my instincts. I didn’t think I was anybody special, so I figured that if instincts were good enough for me, they were good enough for everyone I hired.

I was wrong.

As the founder, everything I did was “right,” because it was the only option. I wasn’t going to fire myself for doing something the wrong way. That wasn’t true for the people I hired. For them, doing something “wrong” could get them fired. So of course they wanted to know up front what was in bounds and what was out. They didn’t need to learn their craft; they had that already. They needed to know how I expected them to use that craft inside my company.

That was my job as CEO: to spell out what our culture was and wasn’t, so I could hold people accountable to it. How else would they know?

The values nobody understood

So I wrote down our values and made an onboarding video to walk every SuperFriend through them:

1. Work together

2. Play together

3. Learn together

4. Eat together

5. Win together

I was proud of these. High-level guidance without being restrictive. I thought I had answered the question.

No one understood what they meant.

The next question was always:

What does it mean to do these things on a SuperFriendly project?

This frustrated me to no end. It was a sobering realization that my job wasn’t done. I still hadn’t set my team up to succeed.

The table that finally worked

I reached out to my friend Wil Reynolds, who introduced me to his director of people operations at Seer Interactive. She walked me through their documentation on role expectations. One thing jumped out immediately: for every expectation, they had a column called “Looks Like,” with examples of that expectation being met at different levels.

Of course! My values were abstract. Theirs came with pictures. Examples are one of the strongest ways people learn, and our onboarding had none.

We moved our values into a shared Notion page, and every value got the same set of columns:

• Why is this important

• Looks Like

• Sounds Like

• Stories & Examples

• Learn More

• Explore this More With…

Here’s the filled-out row for “Eat together”:

• Why is this important: Food is the great equalizer. We can't all migrate database tables or configure a gradient map, but we all eat. Eating together—whether it's a 7-course meal or a handful of snacks—brings people together in a deeper way than work can.

• Looks Like: If the team shares a common mealtime, eat together on a call. (This is different than eating in a work meeting.) It's the equivalent of your team going to the lunchroom together if we all worked in the same office.

• Sounds Like:

  • “Wanna meet together for a coffee chat?”

  • “What did you make to eat today?”

  • “How was that chili yesterday?”

• Stories & Examples

  • At The Cosmopolitan launch workshop, Jamie once brought an extra suitcase full of freshly baked bread, and we spent the first half of the meeting literally breaking bread together with the client.

  • On the way back home from the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists kickoff, we stopped at a hole-in-the-wall pizza place and came up with the insight that drove the entire rest of the project

  • Having rabbit in Prague for the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty kickoff was definitely something to write home about

• Learn More

  • Groups that eat together perform better together

  • A Meal with Jesus, by Tim Chester

  • Building a Company Culture Through Food

  • Leaders Eat Last, by Simon Sinek

• Explore this More With…

  • Matt

  • Crystal

What changed

The questions finally slowed, and something better replaced them.

People started adding their own rows. A developer would drop in a story from a kickoff I wasn’t at. A producer would add a “Sounds Like” line they’d heard in a standup. The document stopped being mine and became ours. Once they could see The SuperFriendly Way, they could see how and where they fit into it.

People want to know they’re doing a good job. As leaders, one of our biggest jobs is showing them exactly what that looks like while they’re under our care.