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.

But the premise, as the subtitle indicates, is that maintaining organizational health is the most important thing you can do as a leader.  I tell our team at Return Path  all the time that our culture is a competitive advantage in many ways, some quantifiable, and others a little less tangible.

A telling point in the book is when Lencioni is relaying a conversation he had with the CEO of a client company who does run a healthy organization – he asked, “Why in the world don’t your competitors do any of this?” And the client responded, “You know, I honestly believe they think it’s beneath them.” Lencioni goes on to say, “In spite of its undeniable power, so many leaders struggle to embrace organizational health because they quietly believe they are too sophisticated, too busy, or too analytical to bother with it.”  And there you have it.  More examples of why “the soft stuff” is mission critical.

Lencioni’s “Recipe for Organizational Health” (the outline of the book):

–          Build a Cohesive Leadership Team

–          Create Clarity

–          Overcommunicate Clarity

–          Reinforce Clarity

And his recipe for creating a tight set of “mission/vision/values” (the middle of the book):

1. Why do we exist?

2. How do we behave?

3. What do we do?

4. How will we succeed?

5. What is most important, right now?

6. Who must do what?

While there are lots of other good frameworks for doing all of this, Lencioni’s models and books are great, simple reminders of one of the CEO’s most important leadership functions.  We’re recrafting our own mission and values statements at the moment at Return Path, and we’re doing it using this 6-Question framework instead of the classic “Mission/Vision/Values” framework popularized a few years back by Harvard Business Review.

The full book series roundup as far as OnlyOnce has gotten so far is:

• The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (post, book)
• The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, book)
• The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, book)
• Death by Meeting (post, book)
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (post, book, Field Guide)
• Silos, Politics and Turf Wars (post, book)
• Getting Naked (post, book)
• The Advantage (book)

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 7 at the broader management team level.  So for us, these are the only times of the year that we are actually in the same place.  But even if we were all in one place, we’d still do them.  The main purpose of the offsite is to pull up from the day-to-day and tackle strategic issues or things that just require more uninterrupted time.  The secondary purpose is to continue to build and develop the team, both personal relationships and team dynamics.  It’s critically important to build and sustain deep relationships across the Executive Team.  We need this time in order to be a coordinated, cohesive, high trust, aligned leadership team for the company.  As the company has expanded (particularly to diverse geographies), our senior team development has become increasingly critical

–          WHO:  Every offsite includes what we call our Executive Committee, which is for the most part, my direct reports, though that group also includes a couple C/SVP titled people who don’t report directly to me but who run significant parts of the company (7-8 people total).  Two of the four offsites we also invite the broader leadership team, which is for the most part all of the people reporting into the Executive Committee (another 20 people).  That part is new as we’ve gotten bigger.  In the earlier days, it was just my staff, and maybe one or two other people as needed for specific topics

–          WHERE:  Offsites aren’t always offsite for us.  We vary location to make geography work for people.  And we try to contain costs across all of them.  So every year, probably 2 of them are actually in one of our offices or at an inexpensive nearby hotel.  Then the other 2 are at somewhat nicer places, usually one at a conference-oriented hotel and then one at a more fun resort kind of place.  Even when we are in one of our offices, we really treat it like an offsite – no other meetings, etc., and we make sure we are out together at dinner every night

–          WHEN:  4x/year at roughly equal intervals.  We used to do them right before Board meetings as partial prep for those meetings, but that got too crowded.  Now we basically do them between Board meetings.  The only timing that’s critical is the end of year session which is all about budgeting and planning for the following year.  Our general formula when it’s the smaller group is two days and at least one, maybe two dinners.  When it’s the larger group, it’s three days and at least two dinners.  For longer meetings, we try to do at least a few hours of fun activity built into the schedule so it’s not all work.

–          WHAT:  Our offsites are super rigorous.  We put our heads together to wrestle with (sometimes solve) tough business problems – from how we’re running the company, to what’s happening with our culture, to strategic problems with our products, services and operations.  The agenda for these offsites varies widely, but the format is usually pretty consistent.  I usually open every offsite with some remarks and overall themes – a mini-state-of-the-union.  Then we do some kind of “check-in” exercise either about what people want to get out of the offsite, or something more fun like an envisioning exercise, something on a whiteboard or with post-its, etc.  We always try to spend half a day on team and individual development.  Each of us reads out our key development plan items from our most recent individual 360, does a self-assessment, then the rest of the team piles on with other data and opinions, so we keep each other honest and keep the feedback flowing.  Then we have a team development plan check-in that’s the same, but about how the team is interacting.  We always have one or two major topics to discuss coming in, and each of those has an owner and materials or a discussion paper sent out a few days ahead of time.  Then we usually have a laundry list of smaller items ranging from dumb/tactical to brain-teasing that we work in between topics or over meals (every meal has an agenda!).  There’s also time at breaks for sub-group meetings and ad hoc conversations.  We do try to come up for air, but the together time is so valuable that we squeeze every drop out of it.  Some of our best “meetings” over the years have happened side-by-side on elliptical trainers in the hotel gym at 6 a.m.  We usually have a closing check-out, next steps recap type of exercise as well.

–          HOW:  Lots of our time together is just the team, but we usually have our long-time executive coach Marc Maltz from Triad Consulting  facilitate the development plan section of the meeting.

I’m sure I missed some key things here.  Team, feel free to comment and add.  Others with other experiences, please do the same!

Startup CEO (OnlyOnce- the book!), Part II – Crowdsourcing the Outline

As I mentioned a few weeks ago here, I’m excited to be writing a book called Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Building and Running Your Company, to be published by Wiley & Sons next summer.  Since many readers of OnlyOnce are my target audience for the book, I thought I’d post my current outline and ask for input and feedback on it.  So here it is, still a bit of a work in progress.  Please comment away and let me know what you think, what’s missing, what’s not interesting!

1           Part One: Vision and Strategy (Defining the Company)
1.1          Setting the Company’s Agenda
1.2          NIHITO! (or, “Nothing Interesting Happens in the Office”)
1.3          Setting the Business Direction
1.4          Strategic Planning, Part I: Turning Concepts Into Strategy
1.5          Strategic Planning, Part II: Creating the Plan
1.6          Defining Mission, Vision and Values
1.7          Communicating Vision and Strategy
1.8          The Role of M&A
1.9          The Art of the Pivot
1.10       How Vision and Strategy Change over Time

2           Part Two: Talent (Building the Company’s Human Capital)
2.1          Building a Team
2.2          Scaling the Team
2.3          Culture
2.4          Interviewing
2.5          Recruiting
2.6          Onboarding
2.7          Setting Goals
2.8          Feedback
2.9          Development
2.10       Compensation
2.11       Promoting
2.12       Rewarding
2.13       Managing Remote Offices and Employees
2.14       Firing: When It’s Not Working
2.15       How Talent Changes over Time

3           Part Three: Execution (Aligning Resources with Strategy)
3.1          Making Sure There’s Enough Money in the Bank
3.2          Types of Financing
3.3          Fundraising Basics
3.4          Negotiating Deals
3.5          Pros and Cons of Outside Financing
3.6          Forecasting and Budgeting
3.7          Creating a Company Operating System
3.8          Meeting Routines
3.9          Driving Alignment
3.10       A Metrics-Driven Approach to Running a Business
3.11       Learning
3.12       Post-Mortems
3.13       Thinking About Exits
3.14       How Execution Changes over Time
3.14.1      Finance
3.14.2      Execution

4           Part Four: Management And Leadership (The How of Being a CEO)
4.1          Leading an Executive Team
4.2          Critical Personal Traits
4.3          Being Collaborative
4.4          Being Decisive: Balancing Authority and Consensus
4.5          The Value of Symbolism
4.6          Getting the Most out of People
4.7          Diving Deep without Being Disruptive
4.8          Articulating Purpose
4.9          Collecting Data from the Organization
4.10       Managing in an Economic Downturn
4.11       Managing in Good Times vs. Bad Times
4.12       Communication
4.12.1      Macro (to Your Company and Customers)
4.12.2      Micro (One-on-One)
4.13       How Management and Leadership Change over Time

5           Part Five: Boards (A Unique Aspect of the CEO’s Job)
5.1          Building Your Board
5.2          Meeting Materials
5.3          Meetings
5.4          Between Meetings
5.5          Making Decisions and Maximizing Effectiveness
5.6          The Social Aspects of Running a Board
5.7          Working with the Board on Compensation
5.8          Evaluating the Board
5.9          Serving on Other Boards
5.10       How Boards Change over Time

6           Part Six: Managing Yourself So You Can Manage Others
6.1          Creating a Personal Operating System
6.2          Working with an Executive Assistant
6.3          Working with a Coach
6.4          Finding Your Voice
6.5          The Importance of Peer Groups
6.6          Your Family
6.7          Taking Stock
6.8          Staying Fresh
6.9          Staying Healthy
6.10       Traveling

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 our practices and games, was hugely bummed out when we got rained out, and never had a moment where I couldn’t make the time for it (though clearly the hours had to come from somewhere!).  Given some of the overlap between leading a sports team and leading a company, I thought I’d reflect on the experience a bit here.  There are some common themes between this post and something I wrote years ago, Parenting and Corporate Leadership, with the same caveat that no, I don’t think employees are children or children are employees.  But here are some things I take away from the experience and apply or compare to work.

We established a clear philosophy and stuck to it.  That’s a step that lots of coaches – and managers in the workplace – miss.  The other coaches and I discussed this before the first practice, agreed on it, and shared it directly with the kids.  For this age group in particular, we felt that we were there first and foremost to have fun; second to learn the game; and third, to play hard and fair.  Note there was nothing in this about winning, and that we were really specific about the order of the three objectives.  Even 7 and 8 year olds know the difference between “win at all costs” and “have fun and play ball.”  We reinforced this at every practice and at every game.  Being intentional about a philosophy and communicating it (and of course sticking to it) are key for any leadership situation.

We got lucky.  As I repeatedly said to the parents on the team, we had a group of awesome kids – happy and generally paying attention, and not one troublemaker in the bunch; and we had a group of awesome parents – responsive, supportive, and not a single complaint about what position a kid was playing or where someone was in the batting order.  I’d heard horror stories about both kids and parents from other coaches ahead of time.  It’s possible that the other coaches and I did such a good job that both kids and parents were great all the time…but I think you have to chalk most of that up to the luck of the draw.  Work isn’t all that different.  Having stakeholders who are consistently positive forces is something that sometimes you can shape (you can fire problematic employees) but often you can’t, in the case of customers or even Board members.  Luck matters.

Stakeholder alignment was a critical success factor.  Having said that, I do think the coaches and I did a good job of keeping our stakeholders aligned and focusing on their needs, not ours.  We put extra effort into a regular cadence of communication with the parents in the form of weekly emails and a current web site.  We used those emails to highlight kids’ performance and also let parents know what we’d be working on in practice that week.  We made sure that we rotated kids in the batting order so that everyone got to bad leadoff once and cleanup once.  We rotated kids so that almost every kid played half of each game in the infield and half in the outfield.  We took any and all requests from kids who wanted to play a specific position for a few innings.  Many of these basic principles – communicating well, a clear operating system, listening to stakeholders, a People First approach – are lessons learned from work as a CEO.

Proper expectations and a large dose of patience helped.  After the first couple games, we were 0-2, and I was very frustrated.  But I reminded myself that 7 and 8 year olds are just kids, and my frustration wasn’t going to help us achieve our objectives of having fun and learning the game.  So I recalibrated my expectations and took much more of a laid-back attitude.  For example, any time I saw one kid goofing off a little bit in practice, I gently got him or her back in line.  But when I saw multiple kids’ attention fading, I took it as a sign that whatever I was doing as a coach wasn’t working, called a break, and did something else.  This kind of “look in the mirror” approach is always helpful at work, too.

Reward and recognition were key.  We definitely adopted a Whale Done! approach with the kids.  We got the kids in the dugout fired up to cheer on batters.  First base coaches did big high fives, smiles, and literal pats on the back for every hit.  Post-game huddles and emails to parents focused on highlights and what went right for the kids.  One of my favorite moments of the season was when one player, who only had one hit all year and struck out almost every time at bat, had two hits, an RBI, and a run scored in our final game.  Not just the coaches, but the other kids and all the parents went absolutely BANANAS cheering for this player, and it brought huge smiles to all our faces.  I am 100% certain that the focus on the positive encouraged the kids to try their hardest all season, much as I believe that same philosophy encourages people to take risks and work hard at the office.

The biggest thing I take back to the workplace with me from the experience.  I was reminded about how powerful achieving a state of “flow,” or “relaxed concentration” is.  I recounted these principles in this blog post from a couple different books I’ve read over the years – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow and Tim Gallway’s Inner Game books – Golf, Tennis, and Work.  The gist of achieving a state of flow is to set clear goals that are stretch but achievable, become immersed in the activity, pay attention to what’s happening, and learn to enjoy immediate experience.  All leaders – in sports, business, or any walk of life – can benefit from this way of living and leading.

I loved every minute of coaching.  It helped that we ended up with a really strong record.  But more than that, building relationships with a bunch of great kids and great parents was fun and fulfilling and incredibly thankful and rewarding.  The “thank you ball” that all the kids autographed for me is now a cherished possession.  Working and getting extra time with my own two kids was the icing on the cake.  All I want to know is…is it time for next season yet?  I am ready!

This post is really for Coaches Mike, Paul, and Oliver; and players Emily, Casey, Lauryn, Mike, Josh, Holden, Hudson, Wilson, Drew, Kevin, Matthew, and Christian.

We’ve been in business at Return Path for almost 18 years now.  We’ve seen a number of competitors come and go across a bunch of different related businesses that we’ve been in.  One of the things I’ve noticed and never quite understood is that many of our competitors expend a lot of time and energy publicly trash talking us in the market.  Sometimes this takes the form of calling us or our products out by name in a presentation at a conference; other times it takes the form of a blog post; other times it’s just in sales calls.  It’s weird.  You don’t see that all that often in other industries, even when people take aim at market leaders.

During the normal course of business, one of sales reps might engage in selling against specific competitors — often times, they have to when asked specific questions by specific prospects — but one thing you’ll never see us do is publicly trash talk a single competitor by name as a company.  I’m sure there are a couple people at Return Path who would like us to have “sharper elbows” when it comes to this, but it’s just not who we are.  Our culture is definitely one that values kindness and a softer approach.  But good business sense also tells me that it’s just not smart for four reasons:

• We’re very focused and disciplined in our outbound communications — and there’s only so much air time you get as a company in your industry, even among your customers — on thought leadership, on showcasing the value of our data and our solutions, and on doing anything we can do to make our customers more successful.  Pieces like my colleague Dennis Dayman’s recent blog post on the evolution of the data-driven economy, or my colleague Guy Hanson’s amazingly accurate prediction of the UK’s “unpredictable” election results both represent the kind of writing that we think is productive to promote our company
• We’re fiercely protective of our brand (both our employer brand and our market-facing brand), and we’ve built a brand based on trust, reputation, longevity, and being helpful, in a business that depends on reputation and trust as its lifeblood — as I think about all the data we handle for clients and strategic partners, and all the trust mailbox providers place in us around our Certification program.  Clients and partners will only place trust in — and will ultimately only associate themselves with — good people.  To quote my long time friend and Board member Fred Wilson (who himself is quoting a long time friend and former colleague Bliss McCrum), if you lie down with dogs, you come up with fleas.  If we suddenly turned into the kind of company that talked trash about competition, I bet we’d find that we had diminished our brand and our reputation among the people who matter most to us.  Our simple messaging and positioning showcases our people, our expertise, and our detailed knowledge of how email marketing works, with a collective 2,000 years of industry experience across our team
• Trash talking your competition can unwittingly expose your own weaknesses.  Think about Donald Trump’s memorable line from one of the debates against Hillary Clinton – “I’m not the puppet, you’re the puppet” – when talking about Russia.  That hasn’t turned out so well for him.  It’s actually a routine tactic of Trump, beyond that one example.  Accuse someone else of something to focus attention away from your own issues or weaknesses.  Don’t like the fact that your inauguration crowd was demonstrably smaller than your predecessor’s?  Just lie about it, and accuse the media of creating Fake News while you’re at it.  Disappointed that you lost the popular vote?  Accuse the other side of harvesting millions of illegal votes, even though it doesn’t matter since you won the electoral college!  Think about all these examples, regardless of your politics.  All of them draw attention to Trump’s weaknesses, even as he’s lashing out at others (and even if you think he’s right).  We don’t need to lash out at others because we have so much confidence in our company, our products, and our services.  We are an innovative, happy, stable, profitable, and growing vendor in our space, and that’s where our attention goes
• Publicly trash talking your competition just gives your competition extra air time.  As PT Barnum famously said, “You can say anything you want about me, just make sure you spell my name right!”

Don’t get me wrong.  Competition is healthy.  It makes businesses stronger and can serve as a good focal point for them to rally.  It can even be healthy sometimes to demonize a competitor *internally* to serve as that rallying cry.  But I am not a fan of doing that *externally.*  I think it makes you look weak and just gives your competitor free advertising.

Last week I wrote about The Tension That Will Come With the Future of Work.  No one knows what the post-pandemic world of office vs. remote work will look like, but there are going to be some clear differences between how people will respond to being in offices or not being offices going forward.  As I said in that post, I think the natural, gravitational pull for senior people will be to do more remote work, because of a combination of their commutes, their personal time, their work setups at home, and their level of seniority…but with the possible exception of engineers, “all remote” may actually not be in the best interest of a number of junior or more introverted team members.

Two things popped up in the last few days that are making it clear to me that there’s another issue all of us — whether you’re a CEO or CXO or an entry level employee — will face.  We’ve become much more efficient in how we do our jobs and run our lives.  In my case, I’ll go ahead and say it — I’m addicted to the efficiency and scarcity of social interactions in my work life now in a way that I’m going to find hard to unwind, so I’m calling it “ruthless efficiency.”

Example 1 is a time-based example.  I’ve been doing virtually all client-related meetings, whether sales calls or customer success calls, in 30 minutes over Zoom or equivalent for a year now.  Sometimes I even get one done in 15 minutes.  Very, very rarely, I’ll book one for an hour.

One of my Bolster colleagues who lives not too far away in Connecticut is having drinks with a very important potential partner one night next week as the temperatures outside warm up here in the northeast.  She invited me to join — and really, I should join.  But then “ruthless efficiency math” sets into my thinking.  Instead of a 30 zoom, this will take me three hours – an hour drive each way plus the meeting.  Maybe I get lucky and I can do a call or two from the car, but is the meeting really worth 4-6x the amount of time just so I can be in person?  Even though this is the kind of thing I would have done without hesitation a year ago…that calculus is really hard to make from where I sit today.

Example 2 is an expense-based example.  We have spent basically $0 for a year on T&E.  Now we are planning some kind of a multi-day team meeting a few weeks from now around the 1-year anniversary of the company to work on planning for the next couple quarters.  The quarterly offsite, including travel, hotels, etc., has been a deeply-ingrained part of my leadership Operating System for 20-25 years now.  OF COURSE we should do this meeting in person and offsite if the public health environment allows it and people are comfortable.  But then “ruthless efficiency math” sets into my thinking.  What’s this meeting going to cost?  $10,000?  Depends where we do it and how many team members come since we have people in multiple cities.  But YIKES, that’s a lot of money.  We are a STARTUP.  Shouldn’t we use money like that for some BETTER purpose?

Forget the big things.  I think we all realize that we don’t have to hop on a plane now and do a day trip to the other coast or Europe or Asia for a couple meetings unless those meetings are do-or-die meetings.  It’s these little things that will be tough to readjust now that we’ve all gotten used to having hours upon hours, and dollars upon dollars, back on our calendars and balance sheets because we’ve gotten addicted to the amazing, and yet somewhat ruthless efficiency of the knowledge worker, pandemic, work from anywhere, get it done in 30 minutes on a screen way of life.

My name is Matt Blumberg. I am a technology entrepreneur and business builder based in New York City who just (in 2020) started a new company called Bolster.

Bolster is an on-demand executive talent marketplace that helps accelerate companies’ growth by connecting them with experienced, highly vetted executives for interim, fractional, advisory, project-based or board roles. Bolster also provides on-demand executives with software and services to help them manage their careers as independent consultants and provides startup and scaleup CEOs with software and content to help them assess, benchmark and diversify their leadership teams and boards.  We are creating a new way to scale executive teams and boards.

Before that, I started a company called Return Path, which we sold in 2019.   We created a business that was the global market leader in email intelligence, analyzing more data about email than anyone else in the world and producing applications that solve real business problems for end users, commercial senders, and mailbox providers.  In the end, we served over 4,000 clients with about 450 employees and 12 offices in 7 countries.  We also built a wonderful company with a signature People First Culture that won a number of awards over the years, including Fortune Magazine’s #2 best mid-sized place to work in 2012.

Early in my career, I ran marketing and online services for MovieFone/777-FILM (www.moviefone.com), now a division of AOL. Before that — I was in venture capital at General Atlantic Partners (www.gapartners.com), and before that, a consultant at Mercer Management Consulting (www.mercermc.com). And I went to Princeton before that.

Based on this blog, I wrote a book called Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, which was published by Wiley in 2013 and updated in 2020.

I have been married for over 20 years to Mariquita, who is, as I tell her all the time, one of the all-time great wives. We have three great kids, Casey, Wilson, and Elyse.

I have lots of other hobbies and interests, like coaching my kids’ baseball and softball teams; traveling and seeing different corners of the world; reading all sorts of books, particularly about business, American Presidential history, art & architecture, natural sciences (for laymen!), and anything funny; cooking and wishing I lived in a place where I could grill and eat outdoors year-round; playing golf; lumbering my way through the very occasional marathon, eating cheap Mexican food; introducing my kids to classic movies; and playing around with new technology.

IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THIS BLOG IS ALL ABOUT, read my first two postings: You’re Only a First Time CEO Once, and Oh, and About That Picture, as well as my updated post when I relaunched the blog with its new name, StartupCEO.com.

My long-time friend and former Board member Brad Feld has become a prolific writer on the startup world over the years and is the person (other than me) most responsible for me getting into that scene as well. Startup CEO is part of his Startup Revolution series, which followed me writing an essay for Do More Faster, and then writing a series of sidebars call “The Entrepreneur’s Perspective” in Venture Deals.

All Brad’s books are listed here. If you’re in the startup universe, I’d encourage you to read all of them. I’m excited to dive into his newest book, The Startup Community Way, which comes out this week from our same publisher, John Wiley & Sons. I’ve gotten part of the way through an early copy, and I love it already.

The approach Brad and his co-author Ian Hathaway take is to evolve their Boulder Thesis from the original Startup Communities book. They dive into the topic and examine it from the perspective of a complex system, which of course anything as fragmented as an ecosystem of public, private, and academic organizations is.

The book — and the whole topic, quite frankly — remind me of a great management book I read several years ago by General Stanley McChrystal called Team of Teams. Organizations have gotten more complex and have had to adapt their structures, and the most successful ones are the ones that have shifted from hierarchical structures to node-based structures, or teams of teams, where individual, agile teams operate with loose points of connection to other teams that focus on dependencies and outcomes.

In the same way, startup communities and the broader ecosystems that touch them have changed and adapted, and the successful ones have learned how to stay loosely connected to other startup communities, prioritize collaboration, and remain focused on inclusion and entrepreneurial leadership.

(This is the fifth post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT.  Other posts in order are 1, 2, 3, and 4.)

Thursday, March 26, Day 10

• Sarah continuing to take over and stronger by the day
• Sarah cleared me to go home, only one more person to ask
• Deep deep dive on Mass Testing – so good to spend that time 
• Pretty much got the strategy right – shocking we could get that close with so little public health experience – Kyle awesome – EOC leadership briefing
• That was most of the day
• Some downloads to Sarah and Kacey
• Feeling that two of our project teams are going sideways – that will be a big focus for me tomorrow before I leave
• Quick assignments for tomorrow
• Talked to Jared – he’s good with me going now that Sarah is in place and things are running.  Awesome!

Friday, March 27,  Day 11

• Download with a couple of the project teams to help get them back on track 
• This whole thing is one big exercise in Agile!
• Serendipitously might have found private sector partner for one of the teams in need.  Reminded of George’s great line, “when the student is ready, the teacher appears”
• Gov briefing on mass testing plan
• Spent a lot of the day on strategy/overview/retrospective deck.  Have to review it with Brad and core team members. Gov wants to get it in front of the National Governors Association to share learnings/best practices for the states behind us in this fight
• Gov thankful goodbye
• Brad thank you Haiku – so awesome – “You see things others don’t see”
• FInal team check-in, lots of nice thank yous from people on team
• Close out drinks with Sarah, Kacey, Kyle – persevered despite lack of corkscrew.  Poor Kyle’s shirt looks like he was standing next to a shooting victim
• Incredibly thankful moment with team – really like and care about these people – we’ve done such great work together – 11 days but feels like months and months
• Close out email to Governor and Chief of Staff about team

Saturday, March 28, Day 12

• Check out!  Fly home! Happy to see Mariquita, Casey, Wilson, and Elyse!

Stay tuned for two more wrap-up posts, tomorrow and the next day…

(This is the third post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT.  First two posts are here and here.)

Friday, March 20, Day 4

• Morning pilates going pretty well, a good daily routine here
• Wellness Screening on the way in for the first time.  Uniformed National Guard guys taking temperature on surface of face/temples.  Can’t get it to work – takes 6x
• Leadership and prioritization of important over urgent – staff the team
• Strategic National Stockpile failure – they send us 60,000 masks and Colorado is using 68,000/day.  They send us ZERO ventilators. Seems like it’s neither strategic nor a stockpile. Guess it really is every state for itself
• Unclear sometimes what the actual role of the state is – sometimes procuring, sometimes getting private sector to procure with some coordination, etc.
• Getting out in front of the parade – the private sector is swarming all over this, how can we help coordinate and channel the energy?
• State gov seems incredibly nimble here – seconding people from departments all over to the crisis, etc.  Bureaucracy is real, but it can melt away in an emergency, or when the governor wants it to. Really impressive
• Going to try DoorDash and see if it’s any different than UberEats.  (It’s not.) Big night.

Saturday, March 21, Day 5

• Saturday but office still 75%
• Wellness Screening again.  Still can’t get thermometer to work for quite a while
• Mike Willis asked for feedback and observations (good) – they are
  • Atmosphere in EOC calm, focused, integrated, SMART, nimble, fast – opposite of “government”
  • Opening meeting on Tuesday morning – calm, focused, caring, quiet urgency
  • Didn’t realize he was military
  • Mentioned yesterday’s “not vetted, not integrated, not helpful” moment, poignant but respectful
• Team pull up, drowning in emails, plan to get organized
• Governor briefing
• Working on replacing me…
• Seamless prioritization of things that are gateway items and enablers.  We have a project tracker, but it’s almost useless. Mostly we are just doing prioritization in the moment.  No choice. Crisis mode
• Gov call – carefully weighing isolation strategy (economic as well as risk of civil disobedience) with number of projected deaths – sounds like the same conversation I’m reading about in the papers at the national level, but really interesting to see it up close and personal. Asked for plan around making food and services safer – super thoughtful “it’s not the economic activity that causes problems, it’s social proximity, are there ways we can keep one and minimize the other?”
• Colorado still has around 500 cases statewide – about ¼ of Westchester County.  Denver has less than 100. Still, feels like we are watching the tsunami coming at us in slow motion
• Dinner at a very close friend’s house who lives in town – elbow bumps and sat at the other end of the table.  Fun and social, but feels like even things like this are about to come to an end. Got to do laundry

Sunday, March 22, Day 6

• Sunday but office still 75%
• Multiple failures again with wellness screen, then we figure it out – on the walk over from the hotel, it’s cold enough that my skin temperature is out of range for the contact thermometers they have.  Since I am coming in early when there is no line, my face is too cold when I get to the front
• Adding staff, nowhere to put them, no organized email lists, working on org charts, have to retool O/S for meetings/tasks.  A little chaotic, but at least I know how to do this stuff
• Finally got connection to NY State to do some benchmarking on testing – doesn’t seem like states coordinate or share info a lot, but the team there was happy to 
• Finally have a few minutes to do planning on major swim lanes
• More working on replacing me
• This is the problem with statistics.  Models are only as good as the inputs, and the inputs here seem like they’re all over the place…not just here in CO, but everywhere.  It’s not like we have a pandemic every year to refine our math
• Interviewing Sarah Tuneberg (came in via Brad) to replace me with Lisa and Stan – she’s AWESOME and she’s hired – starts on the spot by coming in to stand with us behind the Governor at a press conference.  Talk about a rapid recruiting process!
• Seems like she will be awesome.  Probably way better than me – has a ton of public health and emergency/disaster response experience in addition to some private sector/startup/tech experience
• Her first worry never even occurred to me – Fatality Management – morgue surge capacity.  “Gift to the living” – so awesome
• Lameness of Trump press conference – self praise followed by sycophants in the midst of a typhoon
• Gov press conference (here) – authentic and well received.  “Grim reaper” was quite poignant. He worked in the key messages we asked him to about public misinformation of testing, talking points was Google Doc with 30+ people in it – good example of collaboration and control, seamless, last minute but still came out great.  Announces social distancing and lots of good examples about groceries, jogging, still no lockdown
• Lots of RP Colorado people seeing press conference…phone buzzing like mad in my pocket!  So many awesome notes from friends and former colleagues thanking me for being there to help, only one or two snarky comments about my orange tee shirt while others were in blazers (hey, it was a Sunday and the presser was called last minute!)

Stay tuned for more tomorrow…

We run a massive employee survey every year or so called The Loop, which is powered by Culture Amp.  We are big fans of Culture Amp, as they provide not only a great survey tool but benchmarks of relevant peer companies so our results can be placed in external context as well as internal context.

The survey is anonymous and only really rolled up to large employee groups (big teams, departments, offices, etc.), and we take the results very seriously.  Every year we run it, we create an Organization Development Plan out of the results that steers a lot of the work of our Leadership team and People team for the coming year.

I just read every single comment that employees took the time to write out in addition to their checkbox or rating responses.  This year, that amounted to over 1,200 verbatim comments.  I am struggling to process all of them, for a bunch of reasons you’d expect.  Next year we may give employees some examples of comments that are hard to process so they understand what it’s like to read all of them…and we may reduce the number of places where employees can make comments so we try to get only the most important (and more detailed) comments from people to keep the volume a little more manageable.

But I thought it might be useful to give some general advice to people who write comments on anonymous surveys.  Your company may have every good intention of following up on every last comment in an employee survey (we do!), but it’s difficult to do so when:

• The comment is not actionable.  For example, “The best thing about working at Return Path is…’I can afford to live nearby.'”  That doesn’t do much for us!
• The comment is too vague.  For example, “I’m not the engineer I was a year ago” – we have no idea what that means.  Is it a plus or a minus?  What is behind it?
• The comment is likely to be in conflict with other comments and doesn’t give enough detail to help resolve conflicts.  40 positive comments about the lunch program in an office and 40 negative comments about the lunch program in the same office kind of get washed out, but “Lunches are good, but please have more gluten-free options” is super helpful.
• The comment lacks context.  When the answer to the question “What would be the one thing we could do right away to make RP a better place to work?” is “Investing in some systems,” that doesn’t give us a starting point for a next step.
• The commenter disqualifies him or herself.  Things like “Take everything I’m saying with a grain of salt…I’m just an engineer and have no real idea of what I’m doing” that punctuate a comment are challenging to process.
• The commenter forgets that the comments are anonymous.  “I have serious problems with my manager and often think of leaving the company” is a total bummer to hear, but there’s not a lot we can do with it.  I hope with something like this that you are also having a discussion with someone on the People team or your manager’s manager!

We’re doing everything employees would expect us to do – reading the ratings and comments, looking at trends over time, breaking them down by office and department, and creating a solid Organizational Development Plan that we’ll present publicly and follow up on…but hopefully this is useful for our company and others in the future as a guide to more actionable commenting in employee surveys.