Ellie Mirman's Startup Marketing Blog

Transparency as Professional Development

Posted by Ellie Mirman

Jul 27, 2010

While reading a recent article by our CEO Brian Halligan on HubSpot's startup culture, it struck me how important transparency is to the success of an organization. Frequently transparency is touted as a key component to a great company culture. But perhaps just as importantly, transparency is a great means of professional development.

HubSpot has not been particularly formal when it comes to professional development. Not because we don't value professional development, but because we have some pretty big fish to fry and other - less formal - means of frying them (or learning better frying methods?). When I started, I spent the first half of my first day reading The New Rules of Marketing & PR while I waited for my computer. There was no formal training, just throwing me into the ring. These days we've got the HubSpot Fellows program which is a great professional development initiative, albeit sadly short and not as in depth as I'm sure us crazy-type-A-hungry-learners would like.

The greatest professional development we've had is our transparency.

Before HubSpot, I definitely underrated transparency. It's certainly cool to know what the CEO is thinking about or what the engineering team is working on. But it's even more valuable to have the kind of understanding about the problems the CEO is trying to solve or how the engineering team develops a product. (A subtle but important difference.)

At a typical job, you might have a particular project or two that you work on. You are focused on your one project and don't have much exposure to what others are working on or thinking about. At HubSpot we have more than enough work on each of our plates, but that doesn't stop us from commenting on what Brian is writing on the wiki or going to an engineering team sprint planning meeting and asking questions about the development of an application. Transparency allows employees to participate in many more projects and learn about much more of the business. It's the best professional development program there is - and a much more practical approach to learning new business skills.

Topics: startups, work life

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