What Obama’s Tech Startup Has to Teach About Adaptability

USDS marketing chief and former head of marketing for Google X Janine Gianfredi shares her lessons on how to build adaptable teams, even in the most rigid and regulated environments.

On her first day at the U.S. Digital Service, Janine Gianfredi knew the team’s website needed an overhaul. As the agency’s de facto CMO and former head of marketing for Google X, Gianfredi needed to figure out how to tell the new org’s story in a way that would attract top technical talent away from Google, Facebook and the like.

“We completely redid all the content — the language, the tone, the design — and we felt really good about it,” Gianfredi remembers. “But because this is the federal government, we had to vet every piece of content through multiple stakeholders – communications, ethics, policy – and there was a ton of debate on what was acceptable. Many changes were requested. We wanted to say no. We couldn’t. It was the world’s best exercise in adaptability.”

That word has become key, not only for Gianfredi, but for all USDS team members who often parachute into long-standing agencies (think the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs) to shake things up and build new systems. Of course, adaptability doesn’t always mean being overruled. But it does mean listening, adjusting, and trying again in a very specific way — a way defined by learning and resilience.

“Every act we take at the U.S. Digital Service these days is an act of adaptability,” she says. “We thought USDS was going to be about the government adapting to new technology. But more than half of it is us adapting to the culture of government and how it works. A lot of process and policy is there for a reason. But we only find that out when we ask and push.”

WHAT ADAPTABLE PEOPLE DO

The first step to building an adaptable team is to isolate the qualities of adaptable individuals. Because USDS depends on technology professionals serving tours of duty sometimes as short or three to six months, Gianfredi has seen a breadth of people come through and either adjust flexibly or not — allowing her to build a profile of adaptable professional.

“Surprisingly, the number one quality is that they’re stubborn — or, as you might put it, determined to the point of stubborn,” she says. “They’re the person who tells you that there’s a solution to every problem... They know there will be dozens of hurdles, but they never let go of what they’re running toward.”

Stubbornness manifests as an unwillingness to give up. This doesn’t mean it has to always go their way, or that they’re uncompromising. Rather, they’ll bend and change course in service of the North Star that they’ve selected for themselves.

Adaptable people have to be optimistic. I don’t think anyone who’s adaptable lacks this trait.

“Why would you keep struggling so much if you didn’t believe in your eventual success?” Gianfredi says. “Look for people who believe in themselves and their goals so much that they’ll tell you, ‘Of course there’s a way.’ It’s not just that they believe in their solution, they believe in their own ability to come up with another solution that will get the job done.”

When interviewing for adaptability, you want to look for this type of self-belief reflected in past experiences. When did the person forge ahead with a plan against the odds or when it was risky?

“Adaptable people are incredibly supportive of others — they do it because they want to, because they derive enjoyment from being helpful, and without need for reciprocity,” Gianfredi says. “If you want to build a team that can pivot and stay nimble and recover from failure, you need to stack it with people who have demonstrated above and beyond support of colleagues or friends in the past.”

This level of support also cultivates trust — another must if a team is going to adapt successfully. “The key to this is to let people share their successes and failures in a way that’s not overproduced,” she says.

The only way someone is going to adapt to their own wins taking months or years, is if they know that’s how it went for someone else they really respect.

Adaptable people gravitate toward diverse teams. This doesn’t just refer to race or gender. It means a variety of backgrounds, family structures, childhood experiences, educational pedigrees, former industries. They generally like being pushed out of their comfort zones in a way that changes their view of the world and forces them to accept new thinking.

ADAPTABILITY’S ENEMIES

There are three things that Gianfredi has seen kill adaptability stone dead faster than anything else:

Hierarchy. This one isn’t so surprising and it’s clear how she’s discovered this, having come up against government bureaucracy at its thickest and least wavering. But she also believes this happens at startups much more easily than people think.

Conflating process with bureaucracy. They aren’t the same things. “In order to be anti-bureaucratic, a lot of small companies and orgs throw away all process. They say they don’t want red tape, they’ll just stay flat,” says Gianfredi. “What they don’t realize is they’re often making their lives harder than they need to be.”

Bureaucracy refers to unnecessary rules that flow down an organization without adding real benefit. Process can offer massive benefit.

Saying nothing after ‘no.’ U.S. Digital Service employees hear this word a lot. Government projects are complicated, with many interdependencies – things change a lot, and the team experiences pushback regularly. Their first recourse, naturally, is to not take no for an answer and try to push ahead another way.

THE RIGHT HABITAT TO ADAPT

So now you have adaptable people, and you know what to watch out for; how can you create an environment every single day where adaptability is celebrated and thrives? Here are the attributes that Gianfredi has seen adaptable orgs have in common:

They have great documentation of what went wrong.

“If people in your org can point to the things, the moments, the decisions that didn’t work well and what happened afterward — how everyone recovered, or figured out a different way or got around something — you’re in really good shape,” she says.

People ask questions at inappropriate times.

This is really a bellwether for whether you have a rigid or inquisitive culture at work. Don’t look only at how often people ask questions, but actually when.

Employees have ample opportunities to stretch their minds outside of work.

This doesn’t necessarily mean some crazy offsite where everyone has to learn to potato sack race or garden. Instead, you want to give people the time and space to pursue hobbies they individually value.

They have values that point to the next step.

Too many startups create a list of “core values” that simply reflect the qualities they like their employees to have. But creating values is really an opportunity to help guide people through the way you want them to make decisions and adapt to situations that arise.