Pablo Fernandez

Category: Management

  • Culture goals should be achievable

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    A company’s overall goals can shape its culture. Take the popular “Employee of the Month” idea, when employees see it as meaningful, it becomes ingrained in the culture and can motivate higher performance.

    But these goals need to be achievable, and sometimes making them achievable is a small matter of phrasing. Let me show you an example. For Canva, where I work, tenure is important. One way to celebrate tenure would be by marking when people joined. For example, a company can choose to give hoodies like this:

    Person wearing a gray hoodie with 'CLASS OF 2023' printed in white on the front, standing against a plain background.

    The problem with this approach is that it would be impossible for someone to improve in this dimension. Anyone that was hired in 2024 will never achieve having been hired in 2023 no matter what they do.

    Instead, Canva celebrates Canvaversary (your anniversary of having joined Canva). It still transmit the same information: “tenure is valuable, tenure is important”. But the big difference is that every time you see someone display a Canvaversary badge with a number bigger than yours, it is a badge that you can acquire by staying around long enough. It is an achievable goal.

    My laptop now has these stickers:

    Stickers on a laptop showing '1' and '2' for Canvaversary celebrations, along with a Pexels logo.

    And I also have this beautiful pin:

    A commemorative Canvaversary badge featuring the text 'Happy Canvaversary' and the number '2', displayed on a blue background with decorative designs.

    Oh, and at the five year mark they make a poster of you. They are really good. I’m looking forward to my 5 years at Canva poster.

  • The Feedback Loop

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    How Your Response Determines Your Growth

    I work at a pretty amazing company, Canva, that has a culture of feedback. I think I have given and received more feedback in the two years I’ve been here than in the rest of my professional life put together. It has taught me something critical about the importance of a growth mindset. Managing several teams also gave me a lot of perspective here.

    I always thought a growth mindset would have an effect on what happens when you receive feedback, but now I’ve discovered it also has an effect on the frequency and complexity of the feedback. When I have a piece of feedback to give to someone, if that person has a growth mindset, I just give it.

    For the people with a fixed mindset, I know I’ll have objections, challenges, push backs, defensiveness. In those cases, for the feedback to be accepted, I need to collect evidence. I may need one clear case to base my feedback around but then further ones to display the pattern. It takes a lot more work and effort, and at a time when my calendar is back to back meetings and my to do list keeps growing.

    What naturally happens, even if I try to fight it, is that for people with a growth mindset, I give feedback frequently, and for people with a fixed mindset, I drop the frequency. A side effect of that is: the size of the feedback stays lower the higher the frequency is. This means the pain of receiving that feedback is lower. Let’s not pretend that receiving growth feedback is not painful.

    I think a chart showing the two growth paths would help:

    A line chart illustrating the growth trajectories of individuals with a growth mindset (represented by green) versus a fixed mindset (represented by pink), showing significant divergence in progress over time.

    The lesson here is that gracefully accepting feedback has a massive impact on how much of it you will get, and if feedback is a source of growth, then it’s extra valuable to be graceful. Possibly even when the feedback is not correct: saying “Oh, interesting point, I’d like to think about it” is not that costly. This is a lesson I’m still learning.