During the lunch and learn we held for my tenth anniversary, an Improver who had joined the company about a year earlier asked me about my journey through the programs. Had I been involved in Come Together? ImprovingU classes? PATH coaching? What had I actually enjoyed about each of them?
I loved that question, because it’s the one people rarely ask. We talk a lot about what a company does, and almost never about the things it builds to help people connect and grow. Over ten years I’ve been able to touch most of the programs at Improving, and I keep landing on the same answer whenever someone asks me what made me stick around for a decade.
It’s the people. And it’s the programs that give us a reason to come together in the first place.
The nine-year version of this story
Before I get into the programs themselves, it’s worth pointing at how I can talk about any of this with any confidence. I log my involvement as I go, and I wrote a full retrospective at the nine-year mark that broke down the involvement data by year. Nine Years at Improving walks through the arc from my early years through the periods where my activity spiked and dipped. That post is the longer version of what I’ll compress here.
The reason I mention it is that reflection needs a system. If I hadn’t logged what I was doing, I couldn’t tell you today which programs shaped me and which ones I just passed through. Logging is what turns everyday work into long-term memory. Without it, I’d be guessing at ten years instead of remembering them.
The programs that let me share
Come Together is the first one I’d name. Every year since it started, I’ve offered to give a virtual talk during it. I’ve shared on the importance of hobbies, on traveling, and a few other topics I don’t remember now. I love those virtual talks, but I love the in-person events just as much, the way we learn about a culture that’s spread all over the world. That’s the kind of thing that really keeps me here.
It’s not only Come Together, though. I’ve organized ImprovingU classes over the years, on technical topics and on management topics. One year I organized an improv class here in Houston, bringing in an outside trainer, watching how they ran it, then taking classes myself and eventually running the class here and traveling to Dallas to teach it. Somewhere in there, I’ve gone go-karting with whoever wanted to come along. Just a group of Improvers who wanted to have a blast together.
None of that is in my job description. That’s exactly the point. The programs give sharing a home. They take something I would have done quietly on my own and give it an audience, a calendar slot, and a reason to happen again next year. That’s a lot more than most companies offer.
Come Together stands out to me because it runs across every office at once. A virtual talk reaches people in several countries who I’d otherwise never meet, and I’ve gone on to meet some of those same faces in person.
The programs that let me grow others
PATH is another one I love. I’ve been a PATH coach for a long time now, and I’d say it’s become part of my identity. The whole idea of helping other people however I can is something I’ve always gravitated toward, and PATH gives that instinct a structure. It’s not a nice-to-have; it’s a program with a real shape, and that matters.
Then there’s Delivery Excellence, which I helped start as a small group of Improvers building the initial classes years ago. It’s the same story as the other programs: they begin small and, over time, become something the whole company leans on.
A culture that rewards sharing
These programs reward sharing and celebrate people for who they are. That’s not something we find in many other companies. Here, we’re encouraged to track what we do, and that tracking is treated as valuable rather than as overhead.
I don’t care about the points, and I don’t care about how they turn into money somewhere. I care that tracking brings awareness, and that it keeps me accountable to the things I’m doing. I was doing all of this before I joined, anyway. I used to give talks and write posts wherever I worked, because I believed it made me a better engineer and a better person. The difference is that here, that behavior is encouraged and celebrated.
That’s a real difference, and it’s one I feel every week.
Recognizing the people who go further
There’s one more piece to this, and it’s the recognition. When people at Improving go above and beyond, the company notices. Let me rephrase that: the people notice. I wrote about what that recognition actually looks like from the inside in Thought Leadership Is Not What I Thought It Was. It’s not about a title or a badge. It’s about the fact that people see the work you do when you thought nobody was watching.
I’ve had that experience more than once, and it taught me that a silent room can still be full of people listening. The programs are the container for that, and the recognition is what tells you the work landed.
What kept me here
When someone asks me directly what kept me around for ten years, the honest answer is short: people. And the programs that let me spend time with people. The Involvement Program, Come Together, the ImprovingU classes, PATH, Delivery Excellence. They’re not a menu I picked from. They’re the way the company made it easy and natural to keep doing the things I already cared about.
I remember the roots of all of this, too. Back in Brazil, I used to get together with a group of people to share something we’d been working on, the way we do in open sessions here. I’ve been running brown bag meetings in the US since 2004, when a project manager first told me that’s what those meetings were called here, and I’ve carried that everywhere. Sharing was never a program to me. It was how I learned. Improving just built a culture around it.
A company doesn’t keep people with perks or with titles. It keeps them with people, and with the structures that make it easy to be generous with each other. The programs change, and the names change, but the reason they work stays the same: they give good people a reason to be together, and they celebrate the ones who go a little further.
That’s what kept me here. Not any single program, but the fact that the programs exist at all, and the people who show up to them.
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