Start With Why author Simon Sinek was spot on when he said, “Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.”
At Megawatt our goal is to be a home for the most talented individuals in B2B tech marketing. This past year we’ve quickly grown and added more than a dozen employees, partners, and contractors distributed across time zones.
When in a high growth mode, it can be easy for a company to put culture and values on the back burner, but doing so would be a major disservice. I joined the Megawatt team as the VP of talent, culture, and growth to focus exclusively on designing and stewarding our culture so we can all thrive. And so that the things we say we care about are things we actually do. Read on for how we’re building our content marketing agency around relationships and talent.
A focus on talent, not hierarchy
Are you somebody that nerds out about tech? Do you love to write? Do you love storytelling? Do you want to continue to grow as a person and a professional? Megawatt is the place for you. This belief drives our hiring and growth more than a rigid structure on what an agency org chart should look like. When we come across great talent, we don’t worry so much about what exact title they will take on, but how we can use their skillset to help serve our clients with high-quality content that fuels their growth. And how we can help our people be the best versions of themselves.
Our team comes from diverse backgrounds — traditional agencies, journalism, executive coaching, software development, and more. What do we all have in common? Curiosity, a growth mindset, and a passion for the fast moving world of B2B tech. We have fun working together and don’t take ourselves too seriously. We are inquisitive, open-minded, and love pushing ourselves to think bigger. We aim to leave every place, team, and project better than we found it.
To that end, once someone is at the company, we take a custom approach to plotting their career growth which in turn fuels and informs our agency’s growth. Again, this is not based on rigid definitions of what promotions look like or how many account managers we need, but on how we can best cultivate an individual’s talent and interests and allow them to work in their strengths.
That means that a content strategist doesn’t have to automatically grow up to become an account director. They may have an area of interest that can be leveraged to strengthen the entire agency and our clients, for example, analytics and understanding how the content we produce performs and helps our clients achieve their key business objectives. By allowing someone to shape their career at Megawatt around their strengths , we not only get to retain great talent, but innovate in how we are serving our clients and growing our business. We seek to bring out the best in our teammates, empower each other to work in our strengths and grow into our “just right job.” Our goal is to form lifelong relationships that endure long after a tenure at Megawatt has ended. When the quality of our relationships drives the quality of our work, we can shape our business in ways we may otherwise never have thought about.
To do this successfully, a commitment to coaching and feedback are critical.
Humble leadership
We’re big college basketball fans in my house. My uncle was an inspirational division 1 men’s basketball coach at the University of Illinois, Chicago and later went on to start the women’s basketball program at St. Xavier University on the south side of Chicago. I grew up in Chicago watching the 1990’s Bulls dynasty under Phil Jackson’s leadership. My husband is a Tar Heel fan. I look to many of these great coaches for inspiration when I wax poetic about talent development. These days my favorite coach to analogize when training our talent coaches at Megawatt is Ted Lasso, the namesake of the Apple TV hit. Like every coach, Ted’s eventual end goal is for his football club to take home a title, but his path to victory is through meaningful relationships with his players. He digs deep to discover each player’s “X factor,” the one thing they can uniquely contribute to the team, and pushes them towards authentic leadership. He also does not shy away from coaching each player to grow in areas where they struggle. In the words of Ted Lasso, “believe.”
At Megawatt we think about managers as coaches and encouragers. We even refer to our managers as talent coaches. We are creative about our business model and organizational design at Megawatt, and we are absolutely committed to producing high-quality strategic content for our clients. Our commitment to excellence is demanding, and it requires accountability across the organization. Inevitably mistakes will happen, but at Megawatt mistakes are teaching moments. We are self-aware, self-reflective leaders that commit to professional development by proactively seeking and accepting feedback. We embrace opportunities for improvement and we approach others with kindness and empathy.
The quality of our relationships drives the quality of our work
We see our clients and our employees as human beings who are capable of so much more than what fits in a job description or scope of work.
Part of that is being very intentional with how we connect with each other in a fully remote work environment. Of course all of this can be challenging in a remote world, but Megawatt was remote long before the world went that way due to a global pandemic. Our culture was created around connecting online from day one, rather than an in-office culture that quickly needed to be reverse engineered.
On Slack you’ll see us sharing our garden bounties with each other and clients. We have channels for coffee, home design, kids, and dogs. I’ve only met one member from our team in “real life” but I truly feel connected to and friends with each of them.
The result is that we aren’t just executing a rigid scope of work with our clients. We are building a foundation of trust and camaraderie that allows us to partner in the work of creatively solving business problems through content.
Building this culture at Megawatt isn’t just about bringing in more business; it’s really an extension of who we are and what we are passionate about. We want the most talented individuals in B2B tech marketing to find a home where they can do great work and design the career they’ve dreamed of. We’re always looking to talk to great people, even when we don’t have specific job recs up, so if that sounds like you, please drop us a note.
