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
Management
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….
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. …
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…
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…
Book Short (and great concept): Moments of Truth
Book Short (and great concept): Moments of Truth TouchPoints: Creating Powerdul Leadership Connections in the Smallest of Moments, by Douglas Conant, former CEO of Campbell’s Soup Corporation, and Mette Norgaard (book, kindle), is a very good nugget of an idea wrapped in lots of other good, though only loosely connected management advice around self awareness and communication — something I’m increasingly finding in business books these days. It’s a very short book. I read it on the Kindle, so I don’t know how many pages it is or the size of the font, but it was only 2900 kindles (or whatever you call a unit on the device) and only took a few Metro North train rides to finish. It’s…