Niraj Shah of Wayfair.Com, on Employee Recognition This interview with Niraj Shah, co-founder and C.E.O. of Wayfair.com, a seller of home furnishings, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant. Q. What are some important leadership lessons you've learned? A. One thing I've learned over time is that it's important to take a minute and celebrate a win before you move on to the next thing you want to accomplish. One of our values at Wayfair is that we are never done. That speaks to the idea of being tenacious - there is good, but you can do it even better. But you have to celebrate wins and let everyone who worked hard on something know that they were successful and that you're proud of the team. When I was younger, I would just skip right over that. But now I understand that recognition is very important. Q. You've started three companies. What did you do differently in terms of culture with each one? A. When we started our first company, we didn't really have a notion of what company culture was and how it mattered. We basically were figuring things out as we went along. As we grew, people were getting private offices and cubicles. But then you realize that people don't have a good feel for what's going on, and people weren't really talking with their colleagues. All of a sudden we were in a place we just didn't like. When we started this company, one thing we decided early on was that we were never going to have offices. The culture here is about transparency, access to information, open collaboration. A. We developed a better understanding of trade-offs in hiring. You can sometimes find someone who is very skilled in a specific area, but might not have some of the core values we look for - like somebody who is team-oriented, innately bright, highly collaborative, friendly. These traits don't actually speak to somebody's ability necessarily to perform a specific function, but are more human character traits. One thing we figured out over time is that we'll always prioritize the latter over the former. We typically only hire people who are right out of school. They may not have specific skills, but they have all the traits. Q. Tell me more about the core values at the company. A. One, as I mentioned, is that we are never done. We want to keep working harder and harder for the next level of success. "Use our brains" is another one. It's basically about embracing the use of data. We also want really bright people. Another one is, "We love a zillion options." That gets at two things: Our business is all about selection, but it's also about the idea that we try not to be prescriptive, and that there are a lot of different answers to a lot of different things. Another is, "We like transparency." That's about our open culture: Everyone has access to everything, good ideas can come from everywhere, and there are no politics. And we like to say that we are go-to people. That's about team orientation. You want to be able to count on everyone. Q. What was the impetus for writing those values? A. We want them to capture the essence of who we are, so when we recruit, we can tell whether someone will be a good fit. We want people to be able to use them every day and say, these really do sum it up. As we got bigger, we thought it was important to encapsulate what we used to be able to do without having to write it down. We also give out annual awards to people who best exemplify the values. Q. What else is unusual about your culture? A. We have a customer management system, but down the right side of it is something we call our recognition wall, where anyone in the company can write about anyone else in the company and give them rewards dollars they can use for additional discounts on things we sell. There are no restrictions on who can post. It's basically for recognizing someone for something they did for a customer or some other accomplishment. Q. Any mentors over the years who had a big influence on you? A. Somebody I worked for about 12 years ago had a big influence on me. His general management sense and skills were quite amazing. In any given situation, it was always pretty clear to him what to do. He had a good sense of how you manage people, what makes sense and what doesn't make sense, and how you build a team. One situation I remember in particular. Another executive had a plan for something, and I didn't think it made a lot of sense. I was quite frustrated that we were pursuing that plan because I considered it a waste, and I think my manager agreed with me on that particular situation. I was going on about how this doesn't make sense, and that we were going to waste a bunch of money and not accomplish our goal. And he shut the door and said, "You need to support him and support the plan." And I said, "Well, why would you do that?"He said that there is a time you debate, but once a decision is made, you need to support the person. Because the day you have somebody who works for you and you're not supporting them should be the day you fire them, because they are never going to be successful. He said you need to act as a team. There will be times you disagree and there will be time for healthy debate, but if you make a decision, then you have to all pull in the same direction. Q. Let's talk about hiring. What do you look for? A. I'm trying to get a feel for their character and understand what drives them. You can try to differentiate people around experience and past successes, but I try to differentiate them more around whether I would want them on the team if things were really tough. I'm also trying to understand if they would be good at building a team. Would they be good mentors? A big thing in our company is that you really want people who are going to roll up their sleeves. Is this a person who will do that because they have to? Or is this a person who, left to their own devices, would do that because they want to? This interview has been edited and condensed.