383. The Zoo I Built

My leadership team acts like a bunch of animals. It feels like I'm working in a zoo.

My leadership team acts like a bunch of animals.

I was watching a weekly standup as they tried to agree on our top priority. Here’s what happened:

One of them thought everything was the priority.

Another was so focused on something that might matter three years down the road but didn’t matter in the slightest that week.

A third poked her head in, made brief eye contact, and left, for reasons that are still unclear to me to this day.

And the fourth just pitched, with total confidence, the exact idea I threw in the trash the previous week.

These are the people running the company.

And I’m the one who built this zoo.

Let me introduce you to the pack of leaders.

The Dog

I hired the Dog first, because the Dog interviewed like it was the best day of his life. All energy, all heart, he wanted the job so badly you could feel it the moment he leapt into the room.

Everything I loved about the Dog in that interview is real.

The Dog is loyal beyond belief. He would run into traffic for this company, and honestly might, one day, by accident.

He genuinely wants the whole team to win and celebrates like a lunatic when they do. There is no better teammate at 8am on a Monday.

There is also no worse teammate at 8am on a Monday, because the Dog can’t tell a real threat from the mailman.

Everything is an emergency.

A competitor launched a feature? He barks at somebody. Someone reschedules a meeting? He barks. A stapler falls in the other room? The Dog has already alerted the entire Slack channel and is now standing at my desk to confirm I saw the alert about the stapler.

I originally wanted someone who cared this much, so I suppose I should be careful what I wish for.

And that explains my next hire.

The Cat

I hired the Cat because, after the Dog, I needed someone more low-maintenance. Someone who’d just, you know, handle things on their own.

The Cat definitely handles things on her own. She is completely self-motivated and never needs managing. She always radiates the confidence of someone who has never once doubted themselves.

That attitude was a relief to me and is exactly what I hoped for, right up until I realized it wasn’t the Cat’s preference to not be managed, it was her demand.

The problem is you can’t get the Cat to do anything the Cat didn’t already decide to do on her own.

When I schedule a one-on-one, the Cat will decline the invite for no apparent reason whatsoever. When I finally corner the Cat, she’ll listen to my carefully prioritized talking points, looking me in the eye the entire time, and then, with one paw, slowly push the entire list off the table.

The moment there’s real conflict or things get a little tense, the Cat is suddenly, mysteriously, called away for the rest of the day and it’s almost impossible to find her.

I said I wanted someone independent. I probably should have been more specific.

So I hired the Giraffe.

The Giraffe

The Giraffe is a visionary.

This animal can see things further down the road than anyone else I’ve ever met. When the Giraffe says “big things are coming,” big things are usually coming.

I hired the Giraffe because of that vision. That was the whole point.

The catch is that the Giraffe’s head is so far above the ground that she genuinely has no idea what’s happening down there.

“I’m seeing incredible opportunities on the horizon,“ says the Giraffe, while eleven feet below, the building is on fire, payroll didn’t go out, and two engineers just quit.

“Do you smell smoke?“ someone asks.

“I smell,” says the Giraffe with a pause, gazing into nowhere like an omniscient seer. “I smell the future.”

On her first day at work I told the Giraffe that I wanted her thinking bigger. I’ve never regretted a sentence more.

I needed somebody more grounded in the present, and that brought me to the porcupine.

The Porcupine

I hired the Porcupine to protect the team. To say he’s protective might be the understatement of the year.

Nobody sneaks anything past the Porcupine. It’s impossible. And nobody messes with the Porcupine’s people.

The Porcupine makes his boundaries so clear they’re like a barbed wire fence. And that’s the problem.

You will never, ever be able to get close to the Porcupine. Nobody will.

If you try to give the Porcupine even one piece of feedback, you’ll end up bleeding.

You’re not sure how. You only gave one small suggestion and the next thing you know you’re in the parking lot pulling quills out of your forearm for an hour.

The whole team has learned to maintain a safe distance when communicating with the Porcupine. You gently lob over your suggestions and then quickly cower for cover.

Which brings us to the Raccoon.

The Raccoon

I was awed by the Raccoon in his interview.

I realized that he is scrappy and resourceful. If you give him a broken process, a tight deadline, and a dumpster, he’ll come back forty minutes later with a working solution and something shiny.

What I didn’t realize is that the shiny thing used to be yours.

You had an idea last Tuesday. You mentioned it in passing but decided it didn’t quite fit, so you dropped it. Two days later, the Raccoon presents the exact same idea in the all-hands meeting. He had washed it off, polished it up, and delivered it with total confidence and zero indication of where it came from.

And it works.
The Raccoon gets complimented for it.
That’s the crazy thing.

I hired the Raccoon for being resourceful. And he’s extremely resourceful. Just with other people’s resources.

The Elephant

The Elephant has been here longer than anyone. He remembers everything. And I mean everything. His memory is insane.

Whenever a problem shows up, the Elephant knows exactly how the company handled it last time. He knows who to call, what they said before and which folder the spreadsheet was filed in.

At the same time, the Elephant is the reason nothing new ever happens in the company.

When someone pitches a nifty new idea, the Elephant slowly raises its trunk and says, “Umm…We tried that in 2019 and it didn’t work.”

That’s it. That’s the whole contribution from the Elephant.

Not “we tried that in 2019 and here’s what we should do differently.” Just the memory, dropped like a guillotine.

I keep the Elephant for his ability to remember everything. Turns out, that memory also includes the reasons not to do something new.

The Sloth

And then there’s the Sloth, who I almost didn’t hire at all.

The Sloth interviewed slowly. Verrrry slowly.

Everything about the conversation screamed “this animal is going to hold us back,”

I hired her anyway, though for the first month I was sure I’d made a mistake.

The Sloth is slow. She takes forever to respond to anything. You send an urgent email and the Sloth gets to it whenever the Sloth gets to it.

The Dog, for all his flaws, can have five calls and two meetings before the Sloth finishes a single email.

But as I watched what was actually happening, I noticed something surprising.

The Sloth never makes a panic decision. She doesn’t freak out when everybody else is in crisis mode. She doesn’t reverse decisions twice a week, and she doesn’t set a company priority on Monday only to kill it on Friday.

While the rest of my zoo sprints in six different directions, the Sloth moves purposefully in one, and is somehow always holding the right branch when she gets there.

It’s the best hire I almost didn’t make. Which is something I’d tell the Sloth, but I’m not sure she really cares. She seems to be sleeping.

The Zookeeper

Every one of these animals is here because I picked them. The Dog’s panic, the Cat’s disappearing act, the Giraffe’s head in the clouds… all of it.

I didn’t just hire these traits, I promoted the exact traits that now drive me crazy. And here’s the thing I realized throughout the process:

A zoo takes after its keeper.

The team is anxious because I’m anxious.

They stopped bringing me new ideas because they saw what happens to new ideas when I hear them.

And that’s the thing nobody tells you about the zoo.

You’re part of it.

I’m the Dog when I’m fired up and can’t stop pinging people. I’m the Porcupine the second someone touches my work. I’m the Raccoon when I see an idea that I think I can make better. And I’m the Giraffe when I’d so much rather talk about the bright future in front of us than the ugly present sitting in my inbox.

The best leaders aren’t necessarily a particular animal. They’re the ones who can sense which animal they’re being, and pick a better one when it matters.

And the best teams bring all the animals together. You want the Giraffe to see it, the Dog to rally around it, the Sloth to stop everyone from doing something stupid, and even the Raccoon to build something shiny out of garbage at 2am.

That’s what a real team looks like.

The only real question is whether you built a functioning team.

Or did you just build a food chain, with you sitting at the top and wondering why everyone keeps acting like animals.

P.S. I showed this article to the Cat before publishing. She read it, made eye contact, and walked away without saying a word. I’m going to assume that means it’s approved.

Figuring out which animal you default to - and why you do it - is exactly what the free Leadership Diagnostic Workshop is for. Save your seat now.