Two Ears, One Mouth Brace yourself for a post full of pithy quotes from others. I’m not sure how we missed this one when drafted our original values statements at Return Path years ago, because it’s always been central to the way we operate. We aren’t just the world’s biggest data-driven email intelligence company – we are a data-driven organization. So another one of our newly written Core Values is: Two Ears, One Mouth: We ask, listen, learn, and collect data. We engage in constructive debate to reach conclusions and move forward together. I’m not sure which of my colleagues first said this to me, but I’m going to give credit to Anita, our long-time head of sales (almost a…
Category
Management
Job 1
Job 1 The first “new” post in my series of posts about Return Path’s 14 Core Values is, fittingly, Job 1: We are all responsible for championing and extending our unique culture as a competitive advantage. The single most frequently asked question I have gotten internally over the last few years since we grew quickly from 100 employees to 350 has been some variant of “Are you worried about our ability to scale our culture as we hire in so many new people?” This value is the answer to that question, though the short answer is “no.” I am not solely responsible for our culture at Return Path. I’m not sure I ever was, even when we were small. Neither…
Think Global, Act Local
Think Global, Act Local At Return Path, we have always had a commitment to community service and helping make the world around us a better place. We ratcheted that up a lot in the last year, which is why we added the following statement in as one of our 14 Core Values: Think Global, Act Local. We commit our time and energy to support our local communities. We feel strongly that companies can and should make the world a better place in several different ways. Certainly, many companies’ core businesses do that — just look at all the breakthroughs in medicine and social services over the years brought to market by private enterprises, including my friend Raj Vinnakota, who…
Return Path Core Values, Part III
Return Path Core Values, Part III Last year, I wrote a series of 13 posts documenting and illustrating Return Path’s core values. This year, we just went through a comprehensive all-company process of updating our values. We didn’t change our values – you can’t do that! – but we did revise the way we present our values to ourselves and the world. It had been four years since we wrote the original values up, and the business has evolved in many ways. Quite frankly, the process of writing up all these blog posts for OnlyOnce last year was what led me to think it was time for a bit of a refresh. The result of the process was that we…
Scaling Horizontally
Scaling Horizontally Other CEOs ask me from time to time how we develop people at Return Path, how we scale our organization, how we make sure that we aren’t just hiring in new senior people as we grow larger. And there are good answers to those questions – some of which I’ve written about before, some of which I’ll do in the future. But one thing that occurred to me in a conversation with another CEO recently was that, equally important to the task of helping people scale by promoting them whenever possible is the task of recognizing when that can’t work, and figuring out another solution to retain and grow those people. A couple other things I’ve written on…
The Best Place to Work, Part 7: Create a Thankful Atmosphere
The Best Place to Work, Part 7: Create a Thankful Atmosphere My final installment of this long series on Creating the best place to work (no hierarchy intended by the order) is about Creating a thankful atmosphere. What does creating a thankful atmosphere get you? It gets you great work, in the form of people doing their all to get the job done. We humans – all of us, absolutely including CEOs – appreciate being recognized when they do good work. Honestly, I love what I do and would do it without any feedback, but nothing resonates with me more than a moment of thanks from someone on my exec team or my Board. Why should anyone else in the organization…
The Best Place to Work, Part 6: Let People Be People
The Best Place to Work, Part 6: Let People Be People Last week, in this continuing series on creating the best place to work, I talked about being a great enabler of people, meaning you do your best to let people do their best work. This week, I want to talk about Letting People Be People. I wrote about topic a bit this last year when I wrote my series on Return Path’s Core Values, in particular the post on our value People Work to Live, Not Live to Work . Work-life balance is critical. I’ve worked in a grind-it-out 100-hour/week environment as an analyst before. Quite frankly, it sucks. One week I actually filled in 121 on my hourly…
The Best Place to Work, Part 5: Be the ultimate enabler
Fifth in my series on creating the best place to work – Being the best enabler. As any management guru will tell you, as you have a larger and larger team, your job is much less about getting good work done than it is enabling others to get good work done. What does that mean? First, don’t be a bottleneck. You don’t have to be an Inbox-Zero nut (but feel free if you’d like), but you do need to make sure you don’t have people in the company chronically waiting on you before they can take their next actions on projects. Otherwise, you lose all the leverage you have in hiring a team. Don’t let approvals or requests pile up!…
The Best Place to Work, Part 4: Be the Consummate Host
The Best Place to Work, Part 4: Be the Consummate Host Besides Surrounding yourself with the best and brightest , Creating an environment of trust, and Managing yourself very, very well, it’s important for you as a creator of The Best Place to Work to Be the Consummate Host. What does that mean? This is how I approach my job every day. I think of the company as a party, where I’m the host. I want everyone to have a good time. To get along with the other guests. To be excited to come back the next time I have a party (e.g., every day). By the way, I always have co-hosts, as well – anyone who manages anyone in…
The Best Place to Work, Part 3: Manage yourself very, very well
Part of creating the best place to work is learning how to self manage – very, very well. This is an essential part of Creating an environment of trust , but only one part. What does self-management mean? First, and most important, it means realizing that you are in a fishbowl. You are always on display. You are a role model in everything you do, from how you dress, to how you talk on the phone, to the way you treat others, to when you show up to work. But what are some specifics to think about while you swim around in your tank? Don’t send mixed signals to the team. You can’t tell people to do one thing, then…
Hiring vs. Promoting – and a Must-Read Blog
Hiring vs. Promoting – and a Must-Read Blog I have to admit that I have a bit of blog envy when it comes to Fred and Brad. We all started blogging roughly at the same time over 8 years ago (Brad and I the same day, Fred a few month before), and both have hugely large audiences compared to mine. I don’t care all that much — mostly I blog for me and for my company, not for any other reason. But one of the things I admire about both their blogs, particularly Fred, is the size of their *active* audiences. (Both of them tell me not to worry about it when it comes up in conversation — as they…