The 2×4 I took a Freshman Seminar in my first semester at Princeton in 1988 with a world-renowned professor of classical literature, Bob Hollander. My good friend and next-door neighbor Peggy was in the seminar with me. It was a small group — maybe a dozen of us — meeting for three hours each week for a roundtable with Professor Hollander, and then writing the occasional paper. Peggy and I both thought we were pretty smart. We had both been high school salutatorians from good private schools and had both gotten into Princeton, right? Then the first paper came due, and we were both a bit cavalier about it. We wrote them in full and delivered them on time, but…
Category
Leadership
Physical Therapist or Chiropractor?
Physical Therapist or Chiropractor? I was talking to a good friend the other day who is an executive coach. He was telling me that his clients are all over the map in terms of role (CEO or functional senior exec), need (small issue to large issue), company size and stage. But most important, he noted that his clients have different ways of learning, and that he has to tailor his coaching style to the client. I had two main takeaways from this interaction. First, he had a particularly memorable way of phrasing the differences in client learning styles that inform his approach. Some of his clients, he noted, need a physical therapist. They need someone to work with them every…
How to Manage Your Career
I gave a presentation to a few hundred Return Path employees in January at an all-hands conference we did called “How to Manager Your Career.” The presentation has three sections — The Three Phases of a Career, How to Get Promoted, and How to Wow Your Manager. While it’s not as good without the voiceover and interactivity, I thought I’d post it here…see the presentation on Slideshare. As I said to my audience, if there’s one thing to take away from the topic, it’s this: Managing your career is up to one, and only one person – you. It doesn’t matter how great a corporate culture you have, or how supportive your manager is. You’re the only person who cares…
The Gift of Feedback, Part IV
The Gift of Feedback, Part IV I wrote a few weeks ago about my live 360 – the first time I’ve ever been in the room for my own review discussion. I now have a development plan drafted coming out of the session, and having cycled it through the contributors to the review, I’m ready to go with it. As I did in 2008, 2009, and 2011, I’m posting it here publicly. This time around, there are three development items: Continue to spend enough time in-market. In particular, look for opportunities to spend more time with direct clients. There was a lot of discussion about this at my review. One director suggested I should spend at least 20% of my…
Breaking New Ground on Transparency
Breaking New Ground on Transparency I’ve written a lot over time about our Live 360 process for senior leaders in the business. (This post is a good one, and it links to a couple earlier ones that are good, as well.) We take a lot of pride in feedback and in transparency at Return Path, and after 15 years, even for an innovative business, it’s unusual that we do something big for the first time around people. But we did today. This image is of something never seen before at our company. It’s my own handwritten notes about my own Live 360. It’s never been seen before, because no one has ever been physically present for his or her own…
Open Vacation
At Return Path, we’ve had an “open vacation” policy for years, meaning that we don’t regulate the amount of time off people take, and we don’t accrue for it or pay out “unused” vacation if someone leaves the company. I get asked about this all the time, so I thought I’d post our policy here and also answer a couple follow-up questions I usually get about it. First, here’s the language of our policy: Paid Time Off You’re encouraged to take as much time off as you can while maintaining high performance and achieving your goals. We don’t count the hours you work, so why should we count the hours you don’t? (Unless you’re a non-exempt employee, and only then…
HR/People Lessons from Netflix
It feels as if almost everyone in our industry has read the famous Netflix culture deck on Slideshare, and with over 5mm views, that may not be too far off. If you haven’t looked at it before, and if you care about your organization’s culture and how productive and happy employees are the best kind of employees, then take the time to flip through it. As part of a benchmarking exercise we did on employers with unique and best HR/People practices a few years ago, a few of us did either site visits or at least live interviews with leaders at four companies, all of whom are pretty well known for progressive People practices that are also in-line with our…
Startup CEO: The Online Course
As most of you know by now, I wrote a book that was published last fall called Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business. I’m excited to announce that, starting on January 20th, the book has now been turned into Kauffman Fellows Academy (KFA) online course called Startup CEO. Similarly, Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson’s highly successful Venture Deals is also going to launch as Venture Deals KFA online course on February 24th. Both will be offered initially on the NovoEd platform. The parties involved in getting it off the ground (besides me) were the team at Kauffman Fellows Academy and NovoEd. Clint Korver, a serial entrepreneur and Stanford adjunct professor, spearheaded the project, and between filming the course and now, he switched jobs from KFA to be the COO at…
Sabbaticals
I’ve written a few times over the years about our Sabbatical policy at Return Path, including this post and this post about my experience as CEO when one of my direct reports was on his sabbatical, and this post about my own sabbatical. People ask me this all the time, so I thought I’d write the policy out here. This is the language in our employee handbook about them: You have big dreams. We know. This is your chance to cross something off your life list. Whether it’s climbing Mt. Everest, learning Russian or taking your kids across the country in a Winnebago, we believe in rewarding longevity at Return Path and know that a good long break will leave…
Lean In, Part II
Lean In, Part II My post about Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In a couple months ago created some great dialog internally at Return Path. It also yielded a personal email from Sheryl the day after it went up encouraging me to continue “talking about it,” as the book says, especially as a male leader. Along those lines, since I wrote that initial post, we’ve had a few things happen here that are relevant to comment on, so here goes. We partnered with the National Center for Women & IT to provide training to our entire organization on unconscious bias. We had almost 90% of the organization attend an interactive 90 minute training session to explore how these biases work and how…
The Boomerang Club, or How to Quit Your Job, Part II
The Boomerang Club, or How to Quit Your Job, Part II My post last week on How to Quit Your Job has generated about two dozen comments as well as a really lengthy thread on Y Combinator’s Hacker News. My various replies to comments are worth summarizing here – this is a reprint of my comment on Hacker News: First, my post was not intended to be general advice to employees of all companies on how to handle a situation where they’re starting to look for jobs. Of course, many environments would not respond well to that approach. My point was just that that’s how we encourage employees to handle the situation at Return Path, and we have created a…