GEOITS This is another gem that I picked up years ago from my boss at MovieFone — the “Great Employment Office In The Sky.” It’s a simple but powerful concept: the organization is grappling with a difficult employee situation, and the likely path is that the employee needs to leave the organization either immediately or sometime in the future, and it’s impossible for the organization to figure out how to get from A to B for whatever reason, then the employee resigns of his or her own accord, or the employee does something that leaves the organization no choice but to terminate him or her immediately with no gray area This has come up time and again over the years…
Category
Management
The Gift of Feedback, Part III
The Gift of Feedback, Part III I’ve written about our 360 Review process at Return Path a few times in the past: overall process process for my review in particular update on a process change and unintended consequences of that process change) learnings from this year’s process about my staff And the last two times around, I’ve also posted the output of my own review publicly here in the form of my development plan: Here in 2008 Here in 2009 So here we are again. I have my new development plan all spruced up and ready to go. Many thanks to my team and Board for this valuable input, and to Angela Baldonero (my fantastic SVP People and in-house coach),…
Come Fly With Me
Come Fly With Me I do a lot of travel for work. That means I spend a lot of time on planes, some of which is “wasted” – or at least time that can’t be productive for work in the traditional sense of being connected, or in a lot of cases, of even reading. One thing I’ve always appreciated in my career but have grown even more attached to of late is traveling with colleagues. Any time I have an opportunity to do so, I jump on it. First, I find that I get solid work time in with a colleague in transit. A check-in meeting that isn’t rushed with a hard stop, interrupted by the phone or visitors, and…
The Three Functions of a Management Team
The Three Functions of a Management Team After my quarterly Return Path exec team offsite last week, my team and I were rehashing the day’s conversation over dinner. Was it a good day or a bad day? An upper or a downer? We concluded that the day was as it should have been – a good mix of what I will now articulate as the three main functions of a management team. Here they are with some color: Create an environment for success: Do people like to come to work every day? When they get there, do they know what they’re supposed to do, and how it connects to the company’s mission? Are people learning and growing? Are you building…
What a View, Part III
What a View, Part III We are in the middle of our not-quite-annual senior team 360 review process this week at Return Path. It’s particularly grueling for me and Angela, our SVP of People, to sit in, facilitate, and participate in 15 of them in such a short period of time, but boy is it worth it! I’ve written about this process before — here are two of the main posts (overall process, process for my review in particular, and a later year’s update on a process change and unintended consequences of that process change). I’ve also posted my development plans publicly, which I’ll do next month when I finalize it. This year, I’ve noticed two consistent themes in my…
Managing by Checklist
Managing by Checklist The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, started as an article in The New Yorker a few years ago by Atul Gawande and then turned into a book as well (book, Kindle). I haven’t read the book; the story in the article is about life-and-death issues and how Intensive Care Units in hospitals work most successfully when they “manage by checklist” — they keep thousands of small steps performed by different people in order. The story is very telling for business as well and reminiscent of David Allen’s productivity books, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity and Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life. The reality as far as I’m concerned…
The Value (and Limitations) of Benchmarking
The Value (and Limitations) of Benchmarking I think I am starting to drive my team nuts a little bit. I have suggested, prodded, and executed a ton of external benchmarking projects this year, all of which have different leaders inside Return Path doing both systematic and ad hoc phone calls and meetings with peer companies and aspirational peer companies to understand how we compare to them in terms of specific metrics, practices, and structures. It’s some combination of the former management consultant in me rearing its head, and me just trying to make sure that we stay ahead of the curve as we rapidly scale our business this year. Why go through an exercise like this? One answer is that…
Book Short: Multiplying Your Team’s Productivity
Book Short: Multiplying Your Team’s Productivity No matter how frustrated a kids’ soccer coach gets, he never, ever runs onto the field in the middle of a game to step in and play. It’s not just against the rules, it isn’t his or her role. Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown (book, Kindle) takes this concept and drives it home. The book was a great read, one of the better business books I’ve read in a long time. I read a preview of it via an article in a recent Harvard Business Review (walled garden alert – you can only get the first page of the article without buying it), then my…
The Greatest Minds in Email
I recently returned from a six-week sabbatical. It was fantastic. I blogged about it here if you’re curious about the experience. It turned out that, while I was gone, we had probably the most successful, least dramatic six weeks in our 10 year history. I had assumed that’s because the team buckled down while I was out, and so did our Board. Little did we know what really happened during that six week stretch. It’s often said that when the cat’s away, the mice play. The short video below is what greeted me today at an all-hands meeting. If the team can crank out such great work and have this much fun while I’m out, well, I guess I should…
Getting Good Inc., Part II
Getting Good Inc., Part II It was a nice honor to be noted as one of America’s fastest growing companies as an Inc. 500 company two years in a row in 2006 and 2007 (one of them here), but it is an even nicer honor to be noted as one of the Top 20 small/medium sized businesses to work for in America by Winning Workplaces and Inc. Magazine. In addition to the award, we were featured in this month’s issue of Inc. with a specific article about transparency, and important element of our corporate culture, on p72 and online here. Why a nicer honor? Simply put, because we pride ourselves on being a great place to work — and we…
Call Me
Call Me A fine song by Blondie from 1980 and from the soundtrack of the movie American Gigolo. And also something that reminded me about the importance of not relying too much on email this past month. I had surgery on my left wrist in early March to hopefully fix a nagging tendonitis problem. And while I could still write and type post-op, I got sore pretty quickly every day, so I tried to keep those activities to a minimum. As you might imaging, I do an awful lot of email and IM in my line of work. So what was my short response to a huge number of emails and IMs for a few weeks? “Call me.” My communications,…