The following transcript is from an interview between Tim Winner, VP of People at Metal Toad Media, and Brandon Laws, Marketing Manager at Xenium HR, on the podcast episode entitled: Growing Business through People, Culture
Brandon: Welcome everyone, it is my pleasure to welcome Tim Winner to the podcast today. Tim is the Vice President of People at Metal Toad Media in Portland, Oregon and we are very fortunate to have him for today’s episode. Welcome, Tim!
Tim: Thank you, Brandon!
Brandon: So Tim, I want to start out by clarifying something for a lot of our listeners—as the Vice President of People, what does your role entail, and how does it differ from other Vice Presidents of People in other organizations?
Tim: It’s interesting actually, the Vice President of People position, and how it came about here at Metal Toad Media. It’s a very trendy title in today’s world if you are browsing LinkedIn, a lot of companies have a Chief People Officer or Vice President of People. Traditionally, it’s really the head of HR.
At Metal Toad, the Vice President title came out of a different methodology. We structured our company with three verticals: growth, delivery, and people—we’ll grow our business, we’re going to deliver great products and services, and we’re going to do these things through our number one asset, which is people. So as we built the company, we have a Vice President of Growth, we will have a Vice President of Delivery, and we have a Vice President of People, which is how I got the title.
At Metal Toad, there is a huge HR component to it. We view people as our number one asset, so we have a lot of dedicated resources to take care of that asset. With our explosive growth in the past several years, retaining and bringing on great talent has become a big focus for the position. However, our client relationships also fall under it, operations falls under it, finance falls under it—anything to do with people within our organization falls under that vertical and ultimately under me, which is a real honor and very exciting.
Brandon: You mentioned that your company has experienced a lot of growth, and with your focus being on people, what are you doing to differentiate yourself to recruit the best talent? How are you finding the right people and what are you doing that’s so different that attracts those folks? I’d imagine your role specifically deals with that quite a bit.
Tim: The first thing we did was making the investment. We were probably six months to a year ahead of the curve when we decided to hire a full time recruiter and talent acquisition manager. We brought on a pro, and made that investment, and a lot of people shook their heads. But I absolutely wanted somebody who wasn’t recruiting part time. I wanted someone who woke up every morning thinking about great people, looking for great people, and who was out there being an evangelist for Metal Toad in the community, on campus, wherever. I approached recruiting with the goal of being in a position where when we had a position open up, we already had four or five candidates that we’d talked to previously who were already interested. We’d just need to hire them. I didn’t want to do the reverse of having to post a position and go look. Our process is completely reverse of how most people recruit, and we are always looking for quality people to build relationships with within the development community.
We then back it up with a great culture and work environment. We have a “Developer Bill of Rights,” as the traditional model in this business was to completely burn people out. That’s not what we do, we believe in a work-life balance. We have a very, very rich benefits plan, TriMet annual passes, unlimited vacation, and 80-80 insurance for dependents and employees. Aside from all of those things, we have an unbelievable culture of support, which we call a culture of abundance. We have an abundance of help, resources, business—which is very attractive for most people. It goes back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, people like to know that their needs are being taken care of. They need to know that they’re valued and appreciated at work. They need to know that they’ll have the tools that they need to do their job. We work really, really hard to make sure that we fulfill all of those promises.
20140729-IMG_6210Brandon: As you talk about culture, it sounds like you’ve developed it a lot over the years. I don’t know if it was always this way for Metal Toad, but what have you done specifically in terms of creating that culture of development and really focusing on the people? A lot of people talk about recognition programs and team-building exercises as if that’s the culture. What have you done to develop and really enhance the culture to be what it is today, from a leadership perspective?
Tim: Well, I’d love to take credit for it, but I really can’t. All I did was bring my experience into the organization and start to observe. I called out and recognized what a great culture it already was. Maybe I gave the company a comparison, because you really only know what you know. They were working in this really great environment where people are helpful and they genuinely care about each other, and what I did was I came in and called it out from the beginning, even when I was first interviewing at the company.
It was such a different interview experience. We’ve all heard the horror stories of recruiters never calling you back and this and that, but with Metal Toad, everything they said they would do, they did. They never missed a deadline, they communicated openly, and they were very honest about everything all throughout the process. I knew very early on whether I had the job or not. I remember calling that out in the interview and thanking them for having such a buttoned-up process, and they all laughed and said, “We don’t do it intentionally! We just think it’s the right thing to do.” I think that’s the basis of this culture: always acting in the highest sense of right, treating each other like ladies and gentlemen, and truly just doing the right thing. It goes back to the old “remember your please’s and thank you’s.” As adults, we sometimes forget those really basic, simple things. But all people just want to be treated with respect, and respect is one of our biggest values.
So while I’d love to say that I came here and changed everything that was broken, it wasn’t truly broken in the first place, just not fully realized. I think when I began to call it out and recognize it, it began to resonate with people and they began to have a sense of pride in it. I think with my experience, and what I’m very cautious of and where I help steer the ship, is that I know how quickly it can go away. As companies grow quickly, and I’ve been part of several fast-growing organizations, the culture can fall behind very, very quickly. As you grow, you begin to have chaos, and as you have chaos, you want to begin putting processes and policies in place to control it. Whereas if you just step back from that, and that’s really where I see my role and my charge in the organization, which is how do I help to make sure that the culture and our values are alive and that we never overlook them? Yesterday in our stand-up—every week we have a “stand-up” where the whole company stands up to talk, and we do fist bumps and high fives, and we recognize and thank people—and it ran long because we had a new Toad start. Whenever we have a new Toad start, we always welcome them and have a question. We go around the entire company and everyone answers the question. It took a little longer, because we are forty-plus people today. Back when we were five or fifteen it was easy to do.
One of the directors and I went for coffee after the meeting and he said, “I think we might have to quit answering the questions, it’s taking too long.” And I said hold on, why don’t we just make the stand-up 45 minutes long instead of 30? Why would we want to lose that? There again, it’s that idea of getting more efficient and get rid of that, but I’d rather find the time to do that because it’s so important. It’s a cherished event, and it makes the new person feel very, very welcome. But those are the things that are easy to lose when a company’s growing, because you want to become more efficient. And this company will go kicking and screaming, because all companies at this size want to become a big company, and we really don’t want to become a big company. We want to keep our culture and values, and we want to have great growth, but we want to keep our humility intact. That’s why we call ourselves “Toads.” The toad is a very humble creature and we self-identify with that. It’s great when we’re on client calls, because they’ll say, “Okay, Sonja’s here, are the Toads on?” We take great pride in that, and we don’t want to lose those little totems that are so important. I think again, Brandon, it’s just recognizing those and not letting them get in the way of process improvements, and always going back and sharing those.
Brandon: What’s interesting to me is that when you focus on the people, as you have done, and you focus on developing the culture, a couple different things can happen. Organically, I think folks become more productive. You serve your clients better, and you grow because more people want to do business with you. On the other side of it, people also want to work for you. Could you talk about how that’s happened, as it does sounds like it’s happened because you put people first?
Tim: Oh absolutely. This goes back to this not being something I invented here. There was a great training years ago by Southwest Airlines called “It’s So Simple.” At the time, their CEO Herb Kelleher, always had a saying, “It’s much easier to run a company with love than with fear.” Their president at the time said, “I just don’t get it. It’s so simple,” which was how the name of the training came about. And it is so simple, it’s just remembering some of those basic things we learned as children and applying those as adults in our professional life. That can propel you so far, and you can become a place where people want to work. Our development turnover is unbelievably low. In fact, in the time I’ve been here we’ve only lost one developer and we had a party for them when they left as it was such a great opportunity for this individual to work on such a great project that they couldn’t say no.
I have this vision that one day we’ll have these lines out our front door, one going to the left which is clients trying to work with us and one to the right which are people trying to work for us. The hardest part of it is that you cannot compromise. There’s only three guarantees in life, death, taxes, and that if you compromise, you fail. If you compromise on the hiring, and you don’t hire for alignment, you will fail. Our interview process is a gauntlet, and we go through a very intense screening, because we want to make sure that the people we bring into the organization are aligned with our values, and if it’s a good fit for them. Because it’s not a good fit for everyone, as it’s a lot of personal responsibility. Treating each other like ladies and gentlemen is sometimes hard. Always going back to that idea that we must always act in the highest sense of right isn’t easy. But if you get it right, it’s powerful, and I believe it’s fueled a lot of our growth. It really starts with our founder, Joaquin Lippincott, who just operates his whole life that way, in this sense of right. It’s good to build on.
Brandon: “Employer branding” has been sort of a buzzword in HR. It sounds like you are doing an amazing job. Could you tell some of the folks who are listening some of the ways you’ve been able to build your employment brand and how you’re able to create and/or find demand for folks wanting to work for you in the first place?
Tim: I think it goes back to having a full time resource committed to recruiting, who wakes up every morning thinking about that and doesn’t have four other jobs that they’re doing, so that it isn’t an afterthought. I think we could do an even better job of employer branding, we’ve just revisited our website and highlighted what it’s like to work here. We’re in the process of creating a video right now to really highlight what it’s like to be a Toad and to work at Metal Toad. So, Brandon, I’d love to say that it’s great and we’re done and accomplished, I think we’re still learning and working on identifying what we want it to be. So more to come on that.
At this point, I think that having that recruiter is key. She reports to me and we have a conversation every week about how many coffee meeting she had, how many lunches, what does her pipeline of people look like, what are they interested in, what is their timeline—essentially this really rich dialogue around people.
We do tours within our office and invite people to just come hang for the day. We have a Kegerator, not that that’s everything and just the trendy thing to do today, but what different about our Kegerator is that it’s full of beer that our employees brew themselves. And that’s what it was born from, from our folks who were home brewers. We call it Toad-Brew, and it has its own website. So, yes we have a Kegerator, but it’s tied to technology and to the people. So the beer that we drink is actually made by the Toads who work here. Again, it’s about putting people first. I hate to oversimplify it, I wish I had a magic secret for you, but it really does come down to remember the please’s and thank you’s and treating people with respect, letting them know that they’re appreciated. It’s key.
Brandon: It’s funny, because at Xenium our tagline has become “It’s about people.” We’re actually in the middle of redeveloping our website and we’re its_about_peoplereally putting that tagline first, because, in a service organization, our people are what make our brand what it is. It’s everything. And if you don’t do a good job of bringing those folks into the culture and integrating them and really continuing to develop, then I think you’re done for. I think you won’t have success in the future. Luckily, similar to Metal Toad, we’ve had a lot of growth and success because we put people first. So I’m totally aligned with that you’re saying, Tim.
Tim: That’s awesome!
Brandon: Could you talk about policies? Most organizations run their businesses on policies, and I know you have some thoughts on running a business on philosophies versus policies.
Tim: About a year ago there was this deep-seeded need to have an employee handbook. We’re pulling back from that a little, and more of what we believe is that we need to have more philosophies of how we’ll run the business and treat each other and less policies. We believe that if you hire right, and you hire people who are aligned and want to be part of the organization, they don’t really need policies to manage them. They need philosophies around how you work and the environment in which you work, which is really interesting in our business particularly. Because our employees are developers and the way their minds work, they like rules and policies. They like to know. It’s interesting how they’re really gravitating to the philosophy approach to business. There are other companies doing this—Netflix is doing this—but it just really resonates with me. I believe that if you hire adults and you treat them like adults and create an environment—I call it a heroic environment—where people feel valued and appreciated, then you don’t need all those policies. In fact, those policies can be detrimental to the overall success of the company. Then you begin to run the company on policies, and I’ve seen so many companies make bad decisions because of that.
Brandon: Let me ask you about the policies. An employee handbook contains that list of rules for them to follow, but with philosophies, how do you keep those in front of employees? Is it a set of principles that you have posted somewhere, or how does that work?
Tim: It’s kind of a mix. We’ve actually developing an idea we haven’t fully rolled out yet, but we’re building a handbook which we’re using field notes for, and it’s called Toad Lore. It has the story of our company started, it contains our mission statement and values, and some of our norms. For instance, I suppose you could say, “Oh Tim, you have a Kegerator. So what, people can drink at 10am? Oh! There’s a time when the Kegerator opens, so you really have a policy around it.” But it’s really more of a philosophy. Yes, usually the Kegerator opens up at around 4pm. But if someone wanted to earlier, it’s not that they can’t, they just won’t. They know it’s not the right thing to do and that it would be disrespectful to other Toads. I think that’s a philosophy around having a Kegerator, or having alcohol in the workplace, versus a hard policy.
Brandon: It makes a lot of sense. So you’ve developed norms that coworkers hold each other accountable by instead of a set of policies.
Tim: The reason most companies don’t do this, Brandon, is because it’s hard. It’s hard work. It requires a lot of trust. It becomes so dynamic once you get there, but it takes a lot of work. The easy way is to have a set of policies and rules, hold people to that, and manage people. That’s a very comfortable place to be. I prefer believing in people, and I’ll trust people more than I’ll trust procedures or policies. Over my—I won’t tell you how many, but—many years of doing this, I’ve watched too many policies or rules be broken. I’d rather hire people who do the right thing, who really believe that integrity is what you do when nobody’s looking. Operating that way is such a rich and rewarding environment, and it’s a place where people want to come work. And what’s interesting is that you attract a high caliber of talent because it resonates with them, they want to work in that kind of environment. And it gets really fun.
Brandon: I love it. I know we’re short on time, Tim, but I wanted to ask you really quickly—in your role, how do you utilize Xenium as a consulting third party? How does that dynamic work with a role like Vice President of People?
Tim: I couldn’t do my job without Lacey, who’s our Xenium representative. She’s an integral part of our company. She’s on our website, she comes to our stand-ups, she walks in here and you’d think she was a Toad.
Brandon: It kind of proves the point that you’re focused on people, so it totally makes sense that she’d be on the website, too.
Tim: Yes! People just assume she’s a Toad. She knows the personal lives of our employees, she knows what’s going on, and she’s involved in every decision. Without her, and without that partnership, I’d be so tied down in a bunch of other stuff that I wouldn’t be able to do the stuff that I love to do and the things that are really moving the needle. So I think that partnership, and having that experience and that trusted advisor who helps, since I push the line all the time. When we rolled out unlimited vacation, Lacey and Xenium were the first people I went to. I asked, “Do you have any other people who are doing this? How’s it working, could you show me how they communicate it?” So Lacey and Xenium were a huge part of helping us roll that out so successfully. Without them, I couldn’t do it, and I think that is key. Whether you use a third party trusted advisor or you bring someone in, I think you do need to have that person who has the experience and background, knows where the values are and helps guide you through that. I think it’s key.
Brandon: Tim, I really appreciate you coming on today, and I wanted to give listeners an opportunity to either follow your work or get some links to resources that you encourage folks to read on culture and developing their people. Anything that you’d want to provide?
Tim: Absolutely! Our blogs on MetalToad.com have some great content. I would also encourage people to follow me on LinkedIn. I welcome any invitations and always like to connect with people and talk about this further and how can we change the world. That’s what I’m really excited about doing, so I look forward to it.
Brandon: Our guest today has been Tim Winner of Metal Toad. Thank you so much for being part of the podcast, really appreciate it.

Tim: Thank you, Brandon, I appreciate it! Have a great day.