At Asana, we value transparency, balance, working together as peers, and investing in each other, and we try to apply these values to our management culture. We think that good management requires balance. We try to give people the freedom they need to contribute at their full potential, while also providing the support that helps them grow to become even more capable.
Our approach is “distributed responsibility,” exemplified by our AoR (Area of Responsibility) program. Instead of having all decisions flow through the management hierarchy, we go out of our way to distribute them as evenly as possible across all employees. At the same time, our approach emphasizes personal growth, especially through mentorship. I believe the most important contribution of a manager is to serve their reports by unblocking them, mentoring them, and pointing them in a direction that best serves their needs and the priorities of the organization. I explained our approach more in a blog post I posted today on Medium.
We’d like to share our internal document that outlines the beliefs and practices that help inform our management culture at Asana. Our goals for sharing this document are to start a conversation about management culture and inspire other companies to share their own thinking. We’d love to hear your thoughts on management culture in the comments.
