It feels as if almost everyone in our industry has read the famous Netflix culture deck on Slideshare, and with over 5mm views, that may not be too far off. If you haven’t looked at it before, and if you care about your organization’s culture and how productive and happy employees are the best kind of employees, then take the time to flip through it. As part of a benchmarking exercise we did on employers with unique and best HR/People practices a few years ago, a few of us did either site visits or at least live interviews with leaders at four companies, all of whom are pretty well known for progressive People practices that are also in-line with our…
Category
Management
New New Employee Training
Years ago, my co-founder Jack and I developed a training presentation to give to new employees who were not just new to Return Path but also new to the workforce. This is another one of those things, like my last post on our sabbatical policy, that people ask me for all the time. Bringing new people into the workforce is different from just bringing new people into an organization. I know I got a huge amount of value in my first job in management consulting from just learning how to go to work every day and how to be successful professionally. The process you need to go through is like Onboarding, but on steroids. Not everyone has parents or older…
Startup CEO: The Online Course
As most of you know by now, I wrote a book that was published last fall called Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business. I’m excited to announce that, starting on January 20th, the book has now been turned into Kauffman Fellows Academy (KFA) online course called Startup CEO. Similarly, Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson’s highly successful Venture Deals is also going to launch as Venture Deals KFA online course on February 24th. Both will be offered initially on the NovoEd platform. The parties involved in getting it off the ground (besides me) were the team at Kauffman Fellows Academy and NovoEd. Clint Korver, a serial entrepreneur and Stanford adjunct professor, spearheaded the project, and between filming the course and now, he switched jobs from KFA to be the COO at…
Sabbaticals
I’ve written a few times over the years about our Sabbatical policy at Return Path, including this post and this post about my experience as CEO when one of my direct reports was on his sabbatical, and this post about my own sabbatical. People ask me this all the time, so I thought I’d write the policy out here. This is the language in our employee handbook about them: You have big dreams. We know. This is your chance to cross something off your life list. Whether it’s climbing Mt. Everest, learning Russian or taking your kids across the country in a Winnebago, we believe in rewarding longevity at Return Path and know that a good long break will leave…
5 Ways to Get Your Staff on the Same Page
5 Ways to Get Your Staff on the Same Page [This post first appeared as an article in Entrepreneur Magazine as part of a new series I’m publishing there in conjunction with my book, Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business] When a major issue arises, is everybody at your company serving the same interests? Or is one person serving the engineering team, another person serving the sales team, one board member serving the VC fund, another serving the early-stage “angels” and another serving the CEO? If that’s the case, then your team is misaligned. No individual department’s interests are as important as the company’s. To align everyone behind your company’s interests, you must first define and…
Onboarding vs. Waterboarding
Onboarding vs. Waterboarding One of our new senior hires just said to me the other day that he has been enjoying his Onboarding process during his first 90 days at Return Path and that at other companies he’s worked at in the past, the first few months were more like Waterboarding. At Return Path, we place a lot of emphasis on onboarding – the way we ask employees to spend their first 90 days on the job. I’ve often said that the hiring process doesn’t end on the employee’s first day. I think about the employee’s first day as the mid-point of the hiring process. The things that come after the first day — orientation (where’s the bathroom?), context-setting (here’s…
Debunking the Myth of Hiring for Domain Expertise vs. Functional Expertise
Debunking the Myth of Hiring for Domain Expertise vs. Functional Expertise As a CEO scaling your business, you’ll invariably want to hire in new senior people from the outside. Even if you promote aggressively from within, if you’re growing quickly enough, you’ll just need more bodies. And if you’re growing really fast, you will be missing experience from your employee base that you’ll need to augment. For years, I’ve thought and heard that there’s a basic tradeoff in hiring senior people — you can hire someone with great domain expertise, or you can hire someone with great functional expertise, but it’s almost impossible to find both in the same person, so you need to figure out which is more important…
Book Short: Alignment Well Defined, Part II
Book Short: Alignment Well Defined, Part II Getting the Right Things Done: A Leader’s Guide to Planning and Execution, by Pascal Dennis, is an excellent and extraordinarily practical book to read if you’re trying to create or reengineer your company’s planning, goal setting, and accountability processes. It’s very similar to the framework that we have generally adapted our planning and goals process off of at Return Path for the last few years, Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage (book, post/Part I of this series). My guess is that we will borrow from this and adapt our process even further for 2014. The book’s history is in Toyota’s Lean Manufacturing system, and given the Lean meme floating around the land of tech startups…
The Boomerang Club, or How to Quit Your Job, Part II
The Boomerang Club, or How to Quit Your Job, Part II My post last week on How to Quit Your Job has generated about two dozen comments as well as a really lengthy thread on Y Combinator’s Hacker News. My various replies to comments are worth summarizing here – this is a reprint of my comment on Hacker News: First, my post was not intended to be general advice to employees of all companies on how to handle a situation where they’re starting to look for jobs. Of course, many environments would not respond well to that approach. My point was just that that’s how we encourage employees to handle the situation at Return Path, and we have created a…
How to Quit Your Job
How to Quit Your Job I sent an email out to ALL at Return Path a few years ago with that as the subject line. A couple people suggested it would make a good blog post in and of itself. So here’s the full text of it: ALL – This may be one of the weirdest emails you’ll see me (or any CEO write)…but it’s an important message that I want to make sure everyone hears consistently. If nothing else, the subject line will probably generate a high open rate. 🙂 First off, I hope no one here wants to leave Return Path. I am realistic enough to know that’s not possible, but as you know, employee engagement, retention, and…
Unknown Unknowns
Unknown Unknowns There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” –Donald Rumsfeld Say what you will about Rumsfeld or the Iraq war, but this is actually a great and extensible quote. And more to the point, I’d say that one of the main informal jobs of a CEO, sort of like Connecting the Dots in that it’s not one of the three main roles of a CEO) is to understand and navigate known unknowns and unknown unknowns for your organization (hopefully you already understand…