First in my series of posts around creating the best place to work is to Surround yourself with the best and brightest. This one is simple. Build the best team you can possibly build…as you need it. As a founder, you may be the best person at doing everything in your company, especially if you are a technical founder. But as my long-time Board member at Return Path Greg Sands always says, when the organism grows, cells start to specialize. Eventually, you need a liver and a brain. Just like companies need a head of sales and a CFO (not to imply that Anita likes the occasional cocktail or that Jack likes math – turns out both like both). How…
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Human Resources
Post on Return Path and People
Post on Return Path and People For those readers of OnlyOnce who aren’t also readers of Fred’s AVC blog, Fred invited our SVP People, Angela, to guest post on his site this week as part of his series on HR/People. Her post is here, and it’s a great encapsulation of a lot of what we do at Return Path from a People perspective.
The Best Place to Work, Part 0
The Best Place to Work, Part 0 I keep getting questions about a deck I’ve used several times at Techstars, Seedcamp, DreamIt, and the like which is called “7 Ideas for Creating the Best Place to Work.” So today I will launch a 7-part series over the next 7 weeks to describe my 7 points. As always, this is not intended to be perfect or comprehensive, but it is a bit of lessons learned over the last 12-13 years at Return Path. It’s just 7 ideas – not the only 7 ideas. And there’s nothing magic about the number 7, despite what George Costanza says. Or Steven Covey. Here’s the outline: Surround yourself with the best and brightest Create an…
Book Short: Required Reading, Part II
Book Short: Required Reading, Part II Every once in a while, a business book nails it from all levels. Well written, practical, broadly applicable to any size or type of organization, full of good examples, full of practical tables and checklists. The Leadership Pipeline, which I wrote about here over six years ago, is one of those books — it lays out in great and clear detail a framework for understanding the transition from one level to another in an organization and how work behaviors must change in order for a person to succeed during and on the other side of that transition. In an organization like Return Path‘s which is rapidly expanding and promoting people regularly, this is critical. …
Alter Ego
Alter Ego A couple people have asked me recently how I work with an Executive Assistant, what value that person provides, and even questioned the value of having that position in the company in an era where almost everything can be done in self-service, lightweight ways. At my old company (in the 90s), each VP-level person and up had a dedicated assistant – the world certainly doesn’t require that level of support any more. In our case, Andrea has other tasks for the company that take up about half of her time. I happen to have the absolute best, world class role model assistant in Andrea, who I’ve had the pleasure of working with for almost seven years now (which…
Scaling Me
Scaling Me Two things have come up over the last couple years for me that are frustrations for me as a CEO of a high growth company. These are both people related — an area that’s always been the cornerstone of my leadership patterns. That probably makes them even more frustrating. Frustration 1: Not knowing if I can completely trust the feedback I get from deep in the organization. I’ve always relied on direct interactions with junior staff and personal observation and data collection in order to get a feel for what’s going on. But a couple times lately, people had been admonishing me (for the first time) when I’ve relayed feedback with comments like, “of course you heard that…
What Separates Good Teams from Bad Teams?
What Separates Good Teams from Bad Teams? Every once in a while, I have a conversation that forces me to distill an idea to a sound bite – those frequently become blog posts. Many happen with members of my team at Return Path, or my friend Matt on our Saturday morning runs, or my Dad or Mom, or Mariquita. This one happened at dinner the other night with Mariquita and my in-laws Rick and Carmen. The subject came up about managing a senior team, and different iterations of teams I’ve managed over the years. And the specific question we posed was “What are the most significant characteristics that separate good teams from bad teams?” Here’s where the conversation went…“I believe…
People Should Come with an Instruction Manual
People Should Come with an Instruction Manual Almost any time we humans buy or rent a big-ticket item, the item comes with an instruction manual. Why are people any different? No one is perfect. We all have faults and issues. We all have personal and professional development plans. And most of those things are LONG-TERM and surface in one form or another in every single performance review or 360 we receive over the years. So shouldn’t we, when we enter into a long-term personal or professional employment relationship, just present our development plans as instruction manuals on how to best work with, live with, manage, us? The traditional interview process, and even reference check questions around weaknesses tend to be…
Taking Stock
Taking Stock Every year around this time, I take a few minutes to reflect on how the business is doing, on my goals and development plans, and on what I want to accomplish in the coming year. Although most of that work is focused on how to move the business forward, I also make sure to take stock of my own career trajectory. I always ask myself three questions when I do this: Am I having fun at work? Am I learning and growing as a professional? Is my work financially rewarding enough, either in the short term or in the long term? Of course, I always shoot for 3 YES responses. Then I know my career is on track. …
Return Path Core Values, Part II
Return Path Core Values, Part II As I said at the beginning of this series, I was excited to share the values that have made us successful with the world and to also articulate more for the company some of the thinking behind the statements. You can click on the tag for all the posts on the 13 Return Path’s core values, but the full list of the values is below, with links to each individual post, for reference: We believe that people come first We believe in doing the right thing We solve problems together and always present problems with potential solutions or paths to solutions We believe in keeping the commitments we make, and communicate obsessively when we…
Transparency Rules
Transparency Rules I think each and every one of our 13 core values at Return Path is important to our culture and to our success. And I generally don’t rank them. But if I did, People First is a leading contender to be at the top of the list. The other leading contender would be this last one in the series: We believe in being transparent and direct The big Inc. Magazine story about us last year talked a lot about our commitment to transparency and some of the challenges that come with being transparent and direct with people. I’d like to highlight here some of the benefits of being transparent, and the benefits of being direct (sometimes those two things…