Team managers are core to our success at Box

At Box, we know that good management precedes good outcomes. But how does that happen?

None of this happens by accident. In our founding DNA, we established a culture with strong values and incorporated that into everything we do. As we’ve grown our presence globally, surpassed 100,000 customers, and introduced the industry leading Content Cloud, our ability to scale our support for managers has had to keep pace. These managers not only need to lead a cutting edge business, but also help their teams confront historic challenges - from a pandemic and racial and social injustice, to geopolitical conflict and rampant inflation.

We’ve seen how managers drive business outcomes, customer outcomes, and ensure the growth and well-being of all Boxers. Managers also build and foster healthy teams and communities. In this post, we’ll share how we achieve these outcomes - and seek to maintain them - in honor of National Team Manager Day that was on November 6th.

Taking the First Step

Our Accelerate program serves all new managers at Box - whether they’re experienced new hires into Box or it’s the first manager role in their career. We have a highly engaging Manager Essentials curriculum and when you join management at Box you’re introduced to other new managers in our community. You’re given options for how to participate in classes that meet your learning needs. You learn our expectations and best practices for unlocking performance and growth - from coaching your direct reports to building team culture to managing within the law - and you experience this via short, discussion and practice-based live classes where you meet and share with your peers.

When managers complete Accelerate, we celebrate this milestone with a graduation ceremony featuring one of our senior executives for a fireside chat where they share lessons around management and leadership.

The Journey Continues

As managers gain experience and develop on their career journey at Box, they benefit from a wide array of additional learning and growth opportunities. Our curriculum features diverse classes on Box values and culture, making powerful presentations, and overcoming bias; we also offer our Boxers a business license to Udemy to tap into their extensive library of thousands of courses.

As managers look beyond class-based experiences, they are able to participate in our peer coaching program, leverage coaching and wellness supports from Modern Health, and request facilitated session in the Insights Discovery program, where their teams can learn about each others’ preferences and how best to work together.

Our formal programming and systematic support for team managers continues - we also hold monthly, quarterly, and annual learning events, have a slew of self-service tools and guides, and leverage communication channels, technology, and support teams in the People Org to drive continuous effectiveness. In addition, some of the best enablement is home-grown and local within functional and geographic orgs, solving immediate needs with the wisdom and ingenuity of relevant leadership team for that org.

The Executive at Box

When managers take on executive assignments - whether as their first manager role hired into Box, or upon promotion - they also become eligible for additional leadership development. All leaders who are Director and above are part of XLT - the Extended Leadership Team - which means they participate in a special strategic kick-off each year and are able to join monthly briefings with our senior leaders.

At any given time, we also have a number of executives participating in specific development programs. Each year we send two groups of leaders through The Leadership Consortium, where they learn from esteemed Harvard Business School faculty and meet other global business leaders. We also have two fantastic coaching partners. For Directors and Sr Directors we offer BetterUp, and for VPs we offer LevelUp EQ. Leaders are selected to join these programs through a nomination process and we strive to match leaders to programs with an eye towards business need, personal readiness, and diversity and equity. Each participant appreciates the importance of the investments we make in them, leans into the transformational opportunities to work on their growth and effectiveness, and ultimately drive improved engagement and performance on their teams as a result.

Summing Up

At the end of the day, the investments we make in our managers make a big impact. We see it in our annual engagement score data, in our ranking in the Great Places to Work lists, and the feedback we hear from prospective, current, and alumni Boxers. We also see it in our business performance and what we hear from customers. Nevertheless, the world and leadership is always shifting and changing, and we’re always working to improve how we empower our leaders.

At Box, every day is Team Manager Day.

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