Coinbase and how they super-power performance using this Playbook.

Creating a high-performance environment is much more than Kombucha on tap and ping pong tables. More than anything, it's about aligning an organization and a group of people to a mission so hairy and audacious that it's almost palpable.

Coinbase, with their "all in environment" and take no prisoners attitude, has created a culture that understands that without sacrifice, there is no success.

What does this mean in practice?

It means they don’t promise 9 a.m. — 5 p.m. hours or 40-hour workweeks — many days and weeks are long because that’s what it takes to get the job done.

However, because of that intensity, they are also very deliberate about finding time to recover between sprints and quarters, making sure to balance both stress and recovery at every massive step they take to becoming a 100 billion-dollar company.

How deliberate?

Enter the Coinbase Challenge Playbook

Four times a year, the team at Coinbase runs what they call "recharge weeks" (roughly one per quarter), when nearly the entire company will shut down so can all enjoy downtime without work piling up.

Four weeks of coordinated recharge time might sound like a lot of time off for a company in hypergrowth, but given the intensity of their work throughout the year, they believe that this is the best way to ensure a pace that is sustainable for the long term.

That said, it's important to look at this Playbook within the context of Coinbase, and the all in environment culture they've created.

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When to run this Playbook with your team

When it comes to understanding when to implement this Coinbase Playbook with your team, it's necessary to determine the goal of the Playbook, and what you are hoping to accomplish.

• Are you attempting to support your team by helping them recover, take a break, or generally just reducing stress?
• Or is the goal to challenge your team by driving high performance?

In the context of Coinbase, this Playbook is being used in a manner that allows teams the opportunity to go all-in, over a quarter, with those recharge weeks being used as a recovery period before the next intensive quarter begins.

In the world of LEON, this Playbook would be considered a Challenge Playbook.

You can read more about Challenge Playbooks here.

Questions to ask yourself

When we talk about running Challenge Playbooks with teams, it's important to understand where your team is at today, and if this is the right strategy to run within the context of your business function.

As with anything, you need to ask yourself what is the short and long-term effect of running this Playbook, and how will my team perceive it.

So let me ask you:

• Is team burnout risk low right now, and would you consider your team "ready" to handle higher amounts of stress?
• Would you say your team is highly resilient and adaptable to longer hours, added stress, and higher goals?
• Is your culture aligned and does your team live and breathe the mission at hand?

If you answered yes to these questions, maybe this is the right time to put the pedal to the floor, and head for that hockey-stick growth!

How to start this Playbook

Check out the demo below to see how easy it is to find and start a Playbook with your super-powered team!

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Start this Coinbase Playbook today

Use this Playbook, or find an even better Playbook in the Playbook Library that works best for your team.

You can search, start, set due dates, customize and send it to your team right through LEON.

And even better, you can use our weekly check-in feature to understand which teams need help and which groups can be pushed harder.

Get started with LEON today.

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