My dad (one of my main CEO/entrepreneur role models) and I team-teach a business school class in entrepreneurial leadership every year at USD where a friend of his is the professor. Sometimes I go in person, usually I just do it by video. We did this a few weeks ago, and my dad talked through a decision-making framework that I’d never heard him mention before. I sketched it out and really like it and am already using it internally, so I thought I would share it here as well: To walk through it, delegating decision-making to someone on your team can be as simple as understanding where a decision falls along two different spectrums. On the vertical axis is “How familiar…
Category
Management
What kind of team do you run? Of Generalists and Specialists…
A friend of mine just left his job as CEO of a growth stage company to become CFO of a Fortune 500 company. That’s a big deal…and also a big change. When I was talking to him about the move, he said the following to me: Some executive teams are like baseball teams. You play shortstop, and you bat 8th. That’s just what you do. The team needs one of those because the sport is structured that way. The CEO of my new company likes to run his executive team as a basketball team. Everyone has a position, but everyone also has to be capable of doing everything on the court well – shooting, blocking, rebounding, passing – and is expected to go…
Everything is Data, Part II – Get Those Expenses In
Everything is Data, Part II – Get Those Expenses In My friend and former colleague Angela Baldonero (used to run our People Team at Return Path, now is COO of super cool startup Procurify), used to say about her job as head of HR, “Everything is Data.” She guest blogged about that principle on OnlyOnce years ago here , and she particularly cited this theory when talking about the recruiting and hiring process. I’ve thought about this principle a lot over the years, and I’ve occasionally come up with other examples where I think peripheral data can inform whether or not an employee will succeed, at least in my world. I don’t know how many of these can be caught in…
Reboot – Back to Basics
As I mentioned in last week’s post, I’m rebooting my work self this year, and this quarter in particular. One of the things I am doing is getting back to basics on a few fronts. Over the holiday break, as I was contemplating a reboot, I emailed a handful of people with whom I’ve worked closely over the years, but for the most part people with whom I no longer work day in day out, to ask them a few questions. The questions were fairly backward looking: 1. When I was at my best, what were my personal habits or routines that stand out in your mind? 2. When I was at my best, what were my work behaviors or routines…
Managing Up
(The following post was written by one of Return Path’s long-time senior managers, Chris Borgia, who runs one of our data science teams and has run other support organizations in the past, both at Return Path and at AOL. I don’t usually run guest posts, but I loved the topic with Chris suggested it, and it’s a topic that I’d only have a limited perspective on!) Managing Up in a Growing, Global Workplace For many years, I thought “managing up” was a cheap way of getting ahead. I thought someone who managed up was skilled at deceiving their boss into thinking they were more accomplished than they really were. I have since learned that managing up, or managing your boss,…
The Illusion and (Mis)uses of Certainty
September’s Harvard Business Review had a really thought-provoking article for me called How Certainty Transforms Persuasion. Seth Godin wrote a blog post around the same time called The Illusion of Control. The two together make for an interesting think about using information to shape behavior as leaders. I’ve often been accused of delivering too many mixed messages to the company at all-hands meetings, so I enjoyed the think, though not in the way I expected to. Let’s start with Seth’s thesis, which is easier to get through. Essentially he says that nothing is certain, at best we can influence events, we’re never actually in control of situations…but that we think we are: When the illusion of control collides with the reality of…
You Have To Be All In, Until You’re Not
One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that as the organization scales, you have to be all-in, until you’re not. What the heck does that mean? It means that, other than confiding your indecision to a very small number of trusted advisors on a given issue, indecision is poison to the people around you and to the organization in general. So even if you’re thinking of doing something new or different or making a tough call on something, you generally need to project confidence until you’ve made the call. One example of this is around a decision to fire someone on the team, especially a senior executive. Public indecision about this reminds me of years ago when…
The Problem with Titles
The Problem with Titles This will no doubt be a controversial post, and it’s more of a rant than I usually write. I’ll also admit up front that I always try to present solutions alongside problems…but this is one problem that doesn’t have an obvious and practical solution. I hate titles. My old boss from years ago at MovieFone used to say that nothing good could come from either Titles or Org Charts – both were “the gift that keeps on giving…and not in a good way.” I hate titles because they are impossible to get right and frequently cause trouble inside a company. Here are some of the typical problems caused by titles: External-facing people may benefit from a…
The Playbook
As Return Path gets older, we are having more and more alums go on to be successful senior executives at other companies – some in our space, some not. It’s a great thing, and something I’m really proud of. I was wondering the other day if there’s effectively some kind of “RP Playbook” that these people have taken with them. Here’s what I learned from asking five of them. People-related practices are all prominent as part of the Playbook, not surprising for a People First company. Our Peer Recognition program, which is almost as old as the company and has evolved over time, was on almost everyone’s list. Open Vacation is also part of the mix, as was a focus…
The Joy of Coaching
I was the head coach of my two older kids’ little league team this past spring. The whole thing was a little bit of an accident – I vaguely volunteered for something and ended up in charge. The commitment was a little daunting, but I was ok with it since the season was only a couple months long, it was both Casey and Wilson, and both kids, especially Wilson, are really into baseball. Other than helping out a bit here and there, I’d never coached a sports team before. What started off as an unclear assignment ended up as one of the most fun and fulfilling things I’ve done in years. I loved every minute of it, looked forward to…
ReturnShip Program, Part III
I’ve written a couple times this past year about our ReturnShip program, which is a 4-month paid internship program designed for women who have been out of the workforce for more than 3 year to re-enter and build credible and relevant experience, and to expand the talent pool for our organization. I wrote about the initial concept when we launched v2 of the program, and then again when v2 concluded with the hiring of four of the six participants. I’m immensely proud of our organization for inventing the program (Andy Sautins, our CTO, gets credit) and for managing it so well during the last cycle (Cathy Hawley, our VP People, and Miranda Reeves, VP Solution Management, get lead credit, but…