What's the Company Culture Like at Belvedere Trading?

Tell us about a time when you were able to share feedback — either positive or negative — with your company. How was it received? Explain why you felt supported in sharing this feedback.
Founding Belvedere’s Boulder office was both an exciting and difficult project for me. One of the more difficult elements that I wasn’t expecting when we first started the effort was managing our onsite benefits for parity and equity across our physical locations. After we got the office up and running, it quickly became clear that trying to use identical benefits between the two offices wasn’t going to work out well, even though it had been our initial plan. Ensuring that our employees have access to first-class benefits is very important to Belvedere, so I was confident that management would be receptive to the idea that we were going to need to customize how we handle our benefits for each physical location that we support. Despite the complexity that was sure to be involved with making a large organizational change like this, management quickly agreed that we were going to have to make some changes after I presented them with the difficulties that we were facing outside of our Chicago flagship. They were eager to address the problems that we were experiencing as our first larger branch.

How did your employer take action on that feedback? What did these changes demonstrate to you as an employee?
One of the things that I’ve always loved about working at Belvedere is the level of autonomy and ownership that we’re given over our projects and responsibilities. Given this, I wasn’t surprised when the first thing that management asked me after agreeing that change was required was, “What do you think we should do to solve this problem?” I had worked closely with our facility manager in Boulder, Katie Cogan, to come up with some suggestions on how we could best manage benefits by location for Belvedere’s branch offices. We were able to present these ideas for feedback and quickly arrived at a set of solutions that worked well for everyone involved. Boulder was going to get the benefits that we needed in a manner that was fair and equitable to everyone at the firm. Changes like this demonstrate to me how much Belvedere cares about its people and our feedback. Situations like these are easy to gloss over, especially when most of the management team isn’t physically located close to the problem at hand, but that didn’t prevent us from taking quick action to improve the well-being of our team members in this instance.

How does employee feedback influence your company culture and how you feel about your workplace?
One of my core beliefs as a leader is “Feedback is a gift.” Negative feedback in particular can be difficult to receive, but receiving it well is critical to our continued collective improvement as a firm. On the other hand, positive feedback is important to foster well-being in our team members and to let people know when they’re doing a great job. Personally, I have always felt comfortable providing feedback of all kinds to anyone at the firm. The ability to help others by letting them know what they’re doing well and how they can improve is extremely important to me. 

I’ve also been consistently impressed with the feedback that I receive from others within the firm, both on my teams and from others. Effective feedback can be difficult to give, especially when the stakes are high, but ultimately a healthy culture around constructive feedback is one of the most important elements of building high performing teams with the ability for continuous improvement.