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.
Category
Leadership
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…
How Many Thermometers Do You Need to Know the Turkey’s Done?
How Many Thermometers Do You Need to Know the Turkey’s Done? Full credit to my colleague Jack Abbot for using this awesome phrase in an Engineering Management meeting I observed recently. It’s a gem. Filed! The context was around spending extra cycles creating more metrics that basically measure the same thing. And in theory, sure, you don’t want or need to do that, even if you do have a cool data visualization tool that encourages metric proliferation. But as I was thinking about it a bit more, I think there are situations where you might want multiple thermometers to tell you about the done-ness of the turkey. First, sometimes you learn something by measuring the same thing in multiple ways….
Running a Productive Offsite
Running a Productive Offsite A couple OnlyOnce readers asked me to do a post on how I run senior team offsites. It’s a great part of our management meeting routine at Return Path, and one that Patrick Lencioni talks about extensively in Death by Meeting (review, book) – a book worth reading if you care about this topic. My senior team has four offsites per year. I love them. They are, along with my Board meetings, my favorite times of the year at work. Here’s my formula for these meetings: – WHY: There are a few purposes to our offsites. One for us is that our senior team is geographically distributed across 4 geographies at the executive level and 6 or…
Book Short: Alignment Well Defined
The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business is Patrick Lencioni’s newest book. Unlike most or all of his other books (see the end of this post for the listing), this one is not a fable, although his writing style remains very quick and accessible. I liked this book a lot. First, the beginning section is a bit of a recap of his Five Dysfunctions of a Team which I think was his best book. And the ending section is a recap of his Death by Meeting, another really good one. The middle sections of the book are just a great reminder of the basic building blocks of creating and communicating strategy and values – about driving alignment….
How Creative Do You Have to Be?
How Creative Do You Have to Be? To follow up on last week’s post about the two types of entrepreneurs, I hear from people all the time that they can’t be an entrepreneur because they’re not creative. I used to say that myself, but Mariquita reminds me periodically that that’s nonsense…and as a case in point, I didn’t have the original idea that gave birth to Return Path James Marciano did. And I didn’t have the original idea to create a deliverability business, George Bilbrey did. Or an inbox organizer consumer application, Josh Baer did. But I still consider myself an entrepreneur as the founder and leader of the company, as it takes a lot of creativity and business building…
You Can’t Teach a Cat How to Bark, But You Might be Able to Teach it How to Walk on its Hind Legs
You Can’t Teach a Cat How to Bark, But You Might be Able to Teach it How to Walk on its Hind Legs My co-founder George and I have had this saying for a while. Cats don’t bark. They can’t. Never will. They also don’t usually walk on their hind legs in the wild, but some of them, after some training, could probably be taught to do so. Working with people on career evolution sometimes follows that same path. Lots of the time, an employee’s career evolution is natural and goes well. They’re playing to their strengths, in their sweet spot, progressing along nicely. But often that’s not the case. And it goes both ways. Some employees want something different. …
Skip-Level Meetings
I was talking to a CEO the other day who believed it was “wrong” (literally, his word) to meet directly 1:1 with people in the organization who did not report to him. I’ve heard from other CEOs in the past that they’re casual or informal or sporadic about this practice, but I’ve never heard someone articulate before that they actively stayed away from it. The CEO in question’s feeling was that these meetings, which I call Skip-Level Meetings, disempowers managers. I couldn’t disagree more. I have found Skip-Level Meetings to be an indispensable part of my management and leadership routine and have done them for years. If your culture is set up such that you as CEO can’t interact directly…
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. …
The Art of the Quest
Jim Collins, in both Good to Great and Built to Last talked about the BHAG – the Big, Hairy Audacious Goal – as one of the drivers of companies to achieve excellence. Perhaps that’s true, especially if those goals are singular enough and simplified enough for an entire company of 100-1000-10000 employees to rally around. I have also observed over the years that both star performers and strong leaders drive themselves by setting large goals. Sometimes they are Hairy or Audacious. Sometimes they are just Big. I suppose sometimes they are all three. Regardless, I think successfully managing to and accomplishing large personal goals is a sign of a person who is driven to be an achiever in life –…
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…