Hinge CEO on building strong relationships and company culture

Transcript

I think people are craving human connection and community. If we're going to build strong relationships out in the world, we have to have strong relationships internally. We had to make every single Hinge employee a Match Group Insider because we were so transparent with our financials. Why does it matter? It builds a level of trust and authenticity with employees. Welcome to This is Working where leaders share their strategies for success and the lessons that shaped them. Nearly 10 years ago, Hinge reinvented itself to prioritize meaningful connection over matches after users reported experiencing dating app fatigue. In the wake of those changes, Hinge CEO Justin McLeod doubled down on company culture and focused on employee happiness, something he believes is key to Hinge's success. Here's the second part of our conversation. I see you talk about the role that Creativity Inc. has played on your philosophy as a manager and as a leader. You keep a pretty flat organization. Is that still true? Yeah, about four layers of management in the whole company still. Wow. So what's that? How does that work at a company, especially as it grows? Does it ever start fracturing or are you a total believer in this kind of flat world? I've just found that generally I would say keeping a small, highly talented and relatively senior team is a good strategy, especially today with AI and where tooling is going and everything else. I think that having fewer people is better. We never really kind of bloated during the pandemic hiring spree in tech, we just had really thoughtful measured growth and today we're only like 320 employees in the whole company. But it's so tempting, right? People are like, oh, I want to hire people and I need to hire managers under me and they want to hire people. So isn't a natural tendency for people to start building these hierarchical organizations? Do you have to do things to maintain a flat organization? I think we just keep it small. It's less like I only have what, five direct reports. I mean it is not that I have this flat organization where everyone has 10 direct reports. It's just that we keep the organization relatively small and we just prefer to have really, really strong talent. And I just think that you can move much faster when you have a smaller, more dedicated, more talented team than you can with a very large bureaucracy where suddenly everyone has to justify their jobs and create levels of approvals and all that. You have a really interesting company culture. One of the things you're focused on is avoiding burnout. How did you decide that that is something important for you? And then how do you actually make sure people aren't burning out? Yeah, well that's something we think about for our users first of all is how do you create a sustainable experience that actually leads to success. Internally, our main principles are, one is love the problem two is keep it simple. Three is tend to trust and four is decide with principles. Number one is love the problem. That means that we always really try to, I think on our first version of Hinge, we would, someone would come with a feature idea and then we would all get obsessed with this feature and then we would try to ship the feature and it's like a hit rate of, I don't know, 30, 40% of the features would hit. And we would sometimes lose sight of what problem are we really trying to solve here? How deeply do we understand it? What are all the different ways to solve it? How do we spend more time understanding the problem and understanding the user research than we do developing the solution to like how we are actually going to actually solve the problem. So in meetings, if someone starts talking features, do you back up and say, no, no, we don't totally understand the problem yet. Or are we sure we understand the problem? Yes, that happens still more than I'd like it to, and really getting defined on what problem we're trying to solve and why is this the best way to solve it. So that's one way. Two is keep it simple. Our brand colors are black and white. We try to just like keep things as minimal and simple and elegant as possible. I learned the hard way the first time that the more features you build, the more features you have to maintain, the more like interdependencies you create so that if you touch something over here, it breaks something over there. And I've just learned there's a real incremental cost of complexity and that if something isn't really moving the needle, it's not worth keeping at all. And that is a, designing these elegant solutions, stripping out of the product things that aren't really needle moving is hard and often complicated and difficult thing to do, especially if it's an engineering team and a product team will build this feature and they'll work so hard and they'll work three months on it and it'll ship and it won't hurt the numbers, it'll like help marginally, but then you're like, well sorry, but that's not really going to move the needle, so let's try something else. Human nature would be that you feel like a failure. You've launched something, you've worked so hard on it as a team and you're seeing your competitors inside your company, your peers do stuff and maybe it is working and they want to defend it. Does keep it simple allow you to have a culture that says, "it's okay to rip this out." Like that is. Totally. And celebrate failure. And we like we stand up at wrap and we celebrate failures. Like thats, as long as people have a thoughtful approach, and again, we talked about having a relatively flat and small organization, like we get alignment around it and get solicitation and feedback and then we launch it and if it works, amazing. If it doesn't, we'll learn from it and do something different the next time. Trust is all about how do you make sure that you're always building trust in the organization, both at the micro and the macro level. So the macro level is we have a tremendous amount of transparency within the organization. So much so that we had to make, this was novel at Match Group, but we had to make every single Hinge employee a Match Group Insider because we were so transparent with our financials and all of our information with all the employees because we wanted everyone to know. And I've had that ethos from the very beginning of the company that, or since the reboot, of just being really, really transparent about where we are and where the struggles are. Why does it matter? I think it builds a level of trust and authenticity with employees. And so when you say things are good, they believe you and you say things are bad, then they, you are at least sharing that and we can all solve it together. And it's just that, I dunno, it's also just like a personality quirk of mine. I just don't know how to not be authentic. And so that's at the macro level is how we share like our annual plan for example. We essentially take, it's a ritual of ours to take the same presentation that we give to match group and the board and then turn it around and give it to all the employees no matter their level so they can see the same stuff that the board of directors is seeing. And then from a, from a micro level, it's like how do we have our company about relationships? I fundamentally believe that our outsides are going to reflect our insides. And so if we're going to build strong relationships out in the world, we have to have strong relationships internally. And for example, with my executive team, we have a weekly meeting or bi-weekly meeting that's our exec team meeting. It's two hours long. We usually spend the first 30 minutes doing what we call a temperature check where you do a gratitude, an anxiety and a hope about your personal life, what's going on at work, anything, and just spend time getting a sense of where everyone is at so we can level set, build personal trust as a team. And so those kinds of things are just built into the whole company to make sure that there's just a tremendous amount of interpersonal trust in addition to organizational trust. And then the final piece is decide with the principles, which I think we've kind of covered at this point, but we were just like very rigorous about documenting both our overall company culture but also even when we embark on a little project, here are the design principles for how we're thinking about this. And it's just, it cascades through the whole organization. One of the things I've found with principles is it saves you so much. The time you spend on it is then saved tenfold down the line. You're like, oh, what are the principles? This is the decision we didn't make because we already decided on these principles. That's right. It's so helpful. Yea. And then if things aren't going well, you can step back and say, is it because we have the right principles but the wrong execution or the wrong principles? Exactly. And if you can't like disentangle those two, you get stuck in a inability to solve your problems 'cause you don't know really what's going wrong. That's so true. Alright, talk to me about burnout. With your daters, you want, I mean you are famously a app that you expect people to delete. That means that you're successful and you don't want them just serial dating. And then you're saying within the company too, you think about this sort of idea of you were just here for work, this doesn't have to be your whole life. Is that the thinking? It's not something I don't believe in, but it's not like a huge thing that we talk about within the company. But we do try to build a very thoughtful, sustainable environment where our employees like love to come to work. I mean, as you said, we have a 90, a three point something percent annual turnover rate. People don't really leave the company. Is that good by the way? Yeah, 3% voluntary turnover. Voluntary turnover. And I think it's because we've just created an environment that, less that people have all this time off or whatever, people actually work very hard at Hinge, but it's that they feel like they are part of a team. They feel like they have a purpose. They're working with people who are, we'll say like-minded and like-valued and, yea and just doing work that they love. And I think ultimately that's what allows people to feel fulfillment and feel a level of sustainability with their work. And you have sort of engineered ways to make sure that this happens. It's one thing to say you want people to get along and to learn about each other. Do you have to put things in place to make sure that people are building those connections? How do you force that within a company? I think you create lots of opportunities for it. One is you know we do believe in a in-person working environment. That doesn't mean five days a week, but we do try to create a level of synchronicity where people are, because I think a lot of trust building does come from being together in person and having the meeting after the meeting where you're walking out together. We've always had, you know the way our office is designed, for example, and creating opportunities for people to come together. We've always sort of had the center of our office be a big open kitchen area where everyone can come in and grab stuff and it just creates an environment where people will like hang out and connect and meet each other. And we set, I set example as a leader with the temperature checks that I do, and then as a result, the temperature checks that each of my leaders do what their teams and that kind of filters down through the organization. And again, I don't like force it or mandate it, but you just create lots of opportunities, examples for people and they want do it because I think people are craving human connection and community and so you don't have to force people to do it, you just show them how. Like we've all probably been in meetings where you can tell someone is really distracted or angry or has something to clear, but there's not like a forum for them to do that. And so we just have to sit in this kind of awkwardness of holding that person seems a little angry, this person seems a little resentful and burned out. This person, like just letting people kind of let that out on the table so that we can just address it and hear it from each other creates a baseline so that then we can actually focus on the work because we've kind of cleared the withholds and other things. So is that really what happens during a temperature check? Someone will say, I'm really mad about my kid wasn't listening to me this morning and so I'm dealing with this at home or yesterday Sam said this in the meeting and made me mad. Yeah. We have other mechanisms as well talking about we have a term that we use above the line and below the line, am I sort of in a place of openness and expansiveness and curiosity and creativity or am I a place of defensiveness and resentful? And we use that all the time as well. It's like "I really shouldn't talk about this I'm like below the line on it right now. Yeah. Maybe we can talk about it a little bit later." But that happens all the time. Literally actually happened this morning. I went in and I was having an executive team meeting, yea and I felt that someone blamed me for something yesterday that felt a little weird and we had a nice clearing about it and then we were like, "Okay, great. Let's get into the work now, because now that's over with." Versus me sitting there with like, yea. So you went from below the line to above the line in that meeting. Yeah, definitely. Am I using that term right? Yeah. You definitely used, right. Did you come up with that idea or did you read about that somewhere? That came from this woman, Diana Chapman, who wrote a book 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, and I think that she developed this model or at least brought it into the business world. That's very cool. Yeah. What does your workforce look like in terms of generations, do you think about how you manage people in different generations? Or do you buy into that whole idea? Gen Z needs to be managed differently than millennials, etc.? We have a pretty young office, so I do feel like I'm immersed in Gen Z culture. I think the way that we've naturally approached our business and the internal culture really does resonate because I think we are very like intentional and thoughtful and transparent, and we just created the expectation that people have the ability to be heard. We're very responsive as an executive team. We run a regular employee engagement surveys, and so I do think that we are like in tune with the needs and wants and desires of that generation, but I don't think about it as like, oh, I manage generationally, this group of people different from this group of people. I just try to approach everyone with a level of thoughtfulness, intentionality, authenticity, bring your whole self to work. Like those things have been true about the Hinge culture ever since the reboot. And I think it, yeah, I'm not trying to cater to Gen Z, I just think that it like happens. They get pulled into our app the same way that frankly, I didn't really mean to make Hinge a, I thought it was going to be this very intentional for kind of older people who are looking to find their person. And interestingly, our fastest growing demographic is 18 to 24 because they're so attracted to the values of authenticity and courage and empathy which come through in the app. And that intentionality and thoughtfulness I think is something that they really resonate with.