Last week, I wrote about Bringing People Along for The Ride by involving people in the process of ideating and creating change in your organization. That’s the most important thing you can do to make it easy for people to handle change.

But what about the people you don’t or can’t bring along for the ride in that way? If you organization has more than 10 people in it, there will inevitably be people where you’re IMPOSING CHANGE ON THEM. And honestly, even people who are involved in designing change still have to live through its impact.

Today’s post is about managing the actual impact.

The best thing you can do as a leader in helping your organization navigate change is to be empathetic to the fact that, even if you involve people in designing the solution, you are, in fact, making changes to their day to day lives. One of the best books I’ve ever read on this is Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes, by William Bridges. And while there’s a lot more to the book than this one point, I’ll share two graphics from the book and its offshoots that say a lot.

Bridges’ basic concept is to think about changes as having three phases. The end of the old thing, the beginning of the new thing, and the time between the two – when the new thing has been announced, but the it hasn’t taken effect yet. Here’s a look at one powerful graphic on this front, where the point is that productivity (the red line) tanks briefly during the time of uncertainty with the overlay of human emotions at each phase.

Next let’s look at Bridges’ model for how to think about these three phases. This part is critical. They are not discrete phases, where everyone finished “ending” and moves onto “neutral” and then moves on to “new.” From the moment a change is in the offing, until after the change is implemented, people are simultaneously operating in all three zones at the same time, in different proportions.

That means when change starts, you’re already helping them understand that there will be a period of confusion followed by a bright new future. And it means that even when the bright new future has arrived, you’re still mindful of the confusion as well as the things that were special about the past.

I wrote about this a little bit in the second edition of Startup CEO and in this blog post on transitions and integration. The paragraph I’ll call out is:

For ourselves as leaders and me as CEO, knowing most of us would leave almost immediately post-deal, I wanted to have as elegant an exit as possible after 20 years. Fortunately, I had a good partner in this dialog in Mark Briggs, the acquiring CEO. Mark and I worked out rules of engagement and expenses associated with “the baton pass,” as we called it, that let our execs have the opportunity to say a proper goodbye and thank you to our teams, with a series of in-person events and a final RP gift pack. This was a really important way we all got closure on this chapter in our lives

The Baton Pass is a helpful analogy to think about this process. In a relay race, the two runners run alongside each other for a little while until they are at the same pace and proper spot, THEN one hands the other the baton. It’s the time when the past and the future collide, in a neutral zone. When you mark the great things and painful learnings that came before and launch into the bright new future.

The best thing you can do as a leader who is driving change through an organization is to Bring People Along for the Ride. Part of that is involving people in the creation of the new world. But it’s also recognizing that humans have to process change, and that takes time.

It’s fairly rare in a startup or scaleup that you, as a CEO or CXO (Chief [fill in the function] Officer) of any kind, will have significant one-on-one time with other members of the executive suite; instead, you’re most likely to spend time with the team in executive meetings, at offsites, or during all-company events. So, when you do get that one-on-one time it’s important to make sure that it’s not only productive, but that it builds a stronger relationship between you and the other person.

As a CEO I learned that the best way to help people grow and develop, and to further develop a better understanding of each other, is to engage with them in a mix of work and non-work settings.  By that I mean, working together on some aspect of their part of the business. Since each role and each person performing that role are different, there aren’t any hard and fast rules, but I thought I would create a series of posts that provide some ideas on things I’ve done to develop a better relationship, better team, and better company for each CXO in a company. 

I also have a whole series of posts related to each function on the executive team — CFO, CMO, CTO, etc.  So each post is part of two series.  This is the inaugural for both, and it’s quite fitting as Q4 is, for most companies, budgeting and planning season.  So today’s topic is How I engage with the CFO.

When I get the chance to spend time with my CFO I’ve found that we both get the most value working on several “problems” together. For example, we do Mental Math together where we look at key metrics and test them, improve them, or decide to scrap them. We are always attuned to key metrics and from time to time, we project them forward in our minds. What will happen to a key metric if our business scales 10-fold or if it declines 10-fold, for example. 

We are constantly checking to see that our financial and operating results mesh with our mental math.  When looking at our cash balance, we’ll look back at the last financial statement’s cash number and mentally work our way to the current statement: operating profits or losses, big swings in AR or AP, CapEx, and other “below the line” items. Do they add up?  Can we explain what we’re seeing in plain English to other leaders or directors?  The same thing applies to operating metrics — the size of our database, our headcount, our sales commission rate, and so on.

I’ve found that by working on the mental math that we actually come to understand the dynamics of the business far better than merely looking at the numbers or comparing the numbers. The mental math approach forces both you and the CFO to engage with the results, question them, and anticipate how slight changes can impact the company going forward. And once you get to that point, you have the ability to creatively think about how you want to go forward.  Here’s a simple example from the early days of Return Path.  One day, my long-time business partner and CFO Jack and I were doing mental math around how many clients each of our Customer Success team members was handling.  We had an instinct that it wasn’t enough — and we did a quick “how many of those reps would we need if we were doing $100mm in revenue” check and blanched at the number we came up with.  That led to a major series of investments in automation and support systems for our CS team.

Another way that the CFO and I work together is in a game called “spotting the number that seems off.” In any spreadsheet or financial analysis there is bound to be something that doesn’t seem quite right and for some uncanny reason, I am really good at finding the off number. I’m sure this has driven CFOs crazy over my career, but for whatever reason I have some kind of weird knack for looking at a wall of numbers and finding the one that’s wrong.  It’s some combination of instincts about the business, math skills, and looking at numbers with fresh eyes. It’s not an indictment on the CFO’s results and it’s not a “gotcha” moment but it’s part of the partnership I have with my CFO that improves the quality of our work and quantitative reasoning. My hunch is that looking at something with fresh eyes, as opposed to being the person who produces the numbers in the first place, makes it easier to spot something that’s not quite right. Kind of like an editor working with you on an article or book—they always seem to pick up and point out something that you didn’t see even though you spent hours creating it and hours more reading and re-reading something.

A third way to work with the CFO is to create stories with numbers. The best CFOs are the ones who are also good communicators — but that only partly means they are good at public speaking.  Being able to tell a story with numbers and visuals is an incredibly important skill that not all CFOs possess.  Whether the communication piece is an email to leaders, a slide at an all-hands meeting, or a Board call, partnering with a CFO on identifying the top three points to be made and coming up with the relevant set of data to back the number up — and then making sure the visual display of that information is also easy to read and intellectually honest, can be the difference between helping others make good decisions or bad ones.

Of course, a CFO could create stories on their own but like much of storytelling (like screenwriters for movies, plays, or sitcoms, for example), the creative storytelling usually happens with a team. In presenting financial data to others so that it makes an impact, so that it motivates them to take an action or change a behavior, a team approach is best and the CEO-CFO team can be much more effective than either one of them alone.

You won’t have a lot of time to spend 1:1 with any given CXO on your team, including the CFO, but you can make the time you spend together work to your favor in developing a stronger relationship between you and the CFO, and help you build a stronger company that can scale quickly. Without a deep understanding and strong relationship with others on your leadership team, your decision-making, speed, and risk-taking can suffer. Make sure every minute you spend with the CFO is productive. That’s why working on things together like mental math, spotting the off number, and storytelling, can be powerful ways to help you build a better company. 

(Also posted to the Bolster Blog).

(This is the first in a series of three posts on this topic.)

Harry Potter was lucky.  He had, in Albus Dumbledore, the ultimate wise elder, in his corner.  Someone who could teach him how to be a better human being (er, wizard), how to be more proficient with his wand and spells, how to think strategically and defeat the bad guys.

All of us would benefit from having an Albus Dumbledore in our lives.  But most of us don’t — and most of the people we’d call on to be that wise elder in our corner aren’t capable of the full range of advice and counsel that Dumbledore is. 

Why work with a Coach or a Mentor?  I’ll start this post with a quick argument in favor of CEO Coaches and Mentors (sometimes called Advisors).  Even as a 20-something first-time CEO years ago, I was deeply skeptical of the value of a Coach, but that was in 1999 or 2000 when coaches weren’t so commonplace.  Now that their value seems much more obvious, and there are so many amazing Mentors and Coaches available, I’m surprised by how many CEOs I speak to still seem skeptical about their value.  Just think — the world’s greatest athletes, the ones who get paid zillions of dollars because they are the best in the world at something, use MULTIPLE coaches DAILY to perfect their craft and keep them focused.  Why should Rafael Nadal or Serena Williams have a trainer and a coach, but not you?

I’ve benefited over the years from the advice of more people than I can ever count or thank.  But when it comes to being a CEO, I have leveraged the counsel of a CEO Coach or Mentor principally in three different areas:

1. Functional topics on the craft of being a CEO from the lofty “how to run a board meeting” to the nitty gritty details of “how to do a layoff”
2. Developmental/behavioral topics like “how I show up as a leader in the organization,” or “how to be a better listener”
3. Team Effectiveness topics like “how do I get the most out of my leadership team,” or “why doesn’t Person X trust Person Y and how does that impact team performance?”

In some unusual circumstances, you can find a person who does all three of these things for you and can scale as you and your company grow.  But for the most part, getting all three of these things requires engaging two different people, and maybe even more mentors.  

What’s the difference between a CEO Mentor and a CEO Coach?  Counsel on Item 1 above — what I would call CEO Mentorship — almost certainly requires someone to have been a CEO — preferably multiple times, or for a long period of time, or through multiple stages of company growth, or two or three of those qualifiers.  This is the kind of person who can literally teach you how to do CEO things.  These people are super busy, they won’t have open ended amounts of time for you, but you should expect sage wisdom and answers when you need them.  And you can have more than one of them at a time, or change them out as your company evolves and your needs change.

Counsel on items 2 and 3 — what I would call CEO Coaching — frequently come together in a professional who is and has been for a while, a coach.  The person might have had a significant career in business before becoming a coach but wasn’t necessarily a CEO.  The person probably has some kind of academic grounding, like a Master’s degree in Organizational Development or Industrial Psychology, or a Certificate in Coaching.  This is the kind of person who can do things for you and your team like facilitate meetings, run assessments like Myers-Briggs or DISC, and coach other leaders on your team.  This person is dedicated to helping you be the best leader, professional, and CEO that you can be and must be both empathetic and comfortable pushing you hard.  

Sometimes you get mentorship and coaching in the same person, but almost only with CEO Coaches who are also CEO Mentors by my definition above.

Five signs you need a CEO Mentor and/or Coach:

• You are playing ‘whack-a-mole’ — running from crisis to crisis in your organization and are not able to make time to think, be current with email, or make time for important things like hiring senior executives
• Your board is getting frustrated with you, your team and/or the lack of progress in the business
• The company isn’t scaling as fast as it should
• Your leadership team is not a cohesive team and you are in the middle of all decisions
• The company has high employee turnover and/or poor reviews on Glassdoor 

Do yourself and your company a favor and invest in a CEO Coach and Mentor(s). It’s an investment in accelerating your own and your company’s success. In later posts, I’ll talk about how to hire and best leverage both Coaches and Mentors. 

Next post in the series coming:  How to Select a CEO Mentor or CEO Coach

(This post was written by my colleague Bethany Crystal and originally published on the Bolster blog yesterday. While I am still trying to figure out what posts to put on this blog vs. Bolster’s blog since the blogs are pretty similar, I will occasionally run something in both places.)

At Bolster, we believe that 2021 will mark the rise of the on-demand economy for executives. More than ever before, executives are seeking out roles that distinctly aren’t full-time for a variety of reasons – they’re in between full-time roles and want to stay engaged and meet a wide range of potential employers; they’re retired or semi-retired/post-exit and want to keep working, just not full-time; they’re fully employed but are looking for advisory opportunities to help others; or they are committed to the more flexible lifestyle that being an on-demand affords. As business leaders, you might be wondering how to take advantage of this trend and incorporate on-demand talent onto your existing team. Don’t worry – we’ve got you covered.

Let’s start with a quick primer on the distinct types of on-demand talent. Here are the four most common themes we see among our member network at Bolster:

The Four Types of On-Demand Talent

1. Interim: Someone who is partially or fully dedicated to working with your company, but only temporarily (you can think of them as “filling a gap”)
2. Fractional: Someone who works part-time (or “fractionally”) with your company on an ongoing basis (they “own” the function on a long-term, part-time basis)
3. Advisor or Coach: Someone who supports your existing team by offering external advising, coaching, or mentorship as needed (this might be on a temporary or long-term basis)
4. Project-Based: Someone who is brought on to complete a specific project or a fixed span of work (this is the closest to typical consulting work)

Depending on your business needs, the capacity of your existing team, and your resourcing, you might find it useful to have one or more on-demand executives in the mix at any given time. We’ve also found this can be a great way to keep things fresh at the leadership level and make sure new ideas are circulated with some regularity.

Business Opportunities for On-Demand Talent

While every company’s on-demand talent needs will vary, we’ve already seen a few patterns emerge from the 2,000 executives in our member network. Here are a few times to think about bringing on-demand work to your business.

Choose interim work if you need…

• A temporarily placeholder at the exec level
  Whether unexpected or planned, transitions at the executive level can come with a high cost: Any week that goes by with an unfilled seat adds more work to the team, contributes to business lag, or both. While full executive searches can take six months (or more!) to get right, many CEOs find it helpful to bring on interim help as a “stopgap” in the meantime. The most obvious benefit of interim on-demand work is to prevent your business from falling behind in areas where you may not have a deep bench below the executive level. And you might also consider that bringing in a seasoned professional as you conduct your full-time search will give your team a proxy to compare against, making that placement process a bit easier. Last – while it’s not a guarantee, there’s always the chance that your interim hire is a great fit for you and wants to stick around for the long term! You then benefit from an on-the-job “interview” or audition.
• Surge capacity staffing
  Imagine a situation where your business doesn’t need an executive in a particular function. You’re small, scrappy, and you’re getting along perfectly well with the team you have in place – and you can fill in the bits of executive leadership required for that function yourself from time to time. But then something pops up where you need to be the CEO and can’t afford to ALSO be the CXO. An interim CXO could be the right solution. For example, the 3-5 months run-up to a Series A or B financing could be a good time to bring on an experienced CFO if your only relevant team members are handling AP, AR, and Payroll. Or you could be working on your company’s public launch with a less experienced marketing team and an agency – and an interim CMO could make all the difference between success and sideways.
• Parental leave coverage
  With a growing business trend of increased parental leave coverage, CEOs are starting to use interim executives to fill holes that might temporarily exist on the leadership team. Interim work is particularly useful if there isn’t an obvious “second in command” role on that team who might take on a stretch project in their absence. Implemented correctly, bringing on an interim exec can also help to squash any fears of “getting replaced” while someone is away on leave. As an added bonus, bringing in a new face (if only temporarily) can give the remaining team a chance to “try out” a new leadership style and share feedback about what worked and didn’t work during the interim period.

Choose fractional work if you need…

• A seasoned professional’s experience and skillset (but not all the time)
  Before every full-time leadership hire, there is the sticky “in between” period of need. That’s the period when some work starts piling up, but not quite enough to fill an entire work week for one person at the executive level – or the period when you know you need a more seasoned leader in a function but just can’t afford one full-time. If you don’t have an experienced executive in the role, you miss opportunities for effectively setting up scalable practices and processes. Often, a lack of senior focus in a functional area means that you miss strategic opportunities, and sometimes it also means that you expose yourself to risk that could be avoided with the right person having ownership of the function. This is the perfect time to introduce fractional work to your business. The most classic example of fractional executive talent is the CFO who oversees the bookkeeping and accounting for several companies at once. But you can find a fractional executive for just about anything. You might consider this type of on-demand executive if you don’t yet have anyone in that functional area, if you have a team of less experienced specialists or even a more junior generalist leader in that functional area, if you want a taste of what it’d be like to dedicate more resources there, or if you need just a few things done right, without having to think about them yourself.

Choose advisory or coaching work if you need…

• Mentorship for your current executives
  Sometimes it’s helpful to see what “great” looks like in order to achieve greatness yourself. If you’re looking for a way to give a current leader an added boost to their development plan, consider bringing on someone who can serve as a mentor or advisor on a temporary or long-term basis. Someone who has been in your shoes before and can give advice and guidance based on their experience. This on-demand exec role has two big benefits: The first being that it demonstrates to your executive team that you’re committed to their ongoing success and growth, which boosts morale (and hopefully performance). The second is that you’ll be able to equip your current team with the tools they each need to scale instead of having to bring on a new wave of executives for each business stage. The advisor or coach usually works a few hours per month, once they’ve set up a strong coaching relationship.
• Access to top talent without the full-time price tag
  Just as remote work unlocked the potential to find “the best of the best” without geographic constraints, on-demand work does the same at the executive level. More and more, we’re seeing CEOs incorporate advisors to their business as a way to gain exposure to best in class talent (at a fraction of the cost). This can be a great way to introduce subject matter or functional expertise into your organization without committing to a full-time salary.

Choose project work if you need…

• A fixed-scope expert engagement at the executive level
  Just as tools like Task Rabbit made it possible to find experts to accomplish tasks on a personal level (such as moving furniture or painting a bedroom), on-demand talent makes it possible to find seasoned executives to complete one-off projects at an expert level. That’s why, on Bolster, we ask each each member to indicate what roles they can take on, and also what projects they can be hired to do. As a CEO, you might consider outsourcing some of the crunchy stuff at the exec level that might take a lot of time, or in cases where you need a quick turnaround to get to an MVP. Common projects we’ve seen to date include building sales commission plan structures, designing a go-to-market launch plan for a new product, running due diligence on an acquisition, overhauling pricing and packaging, working on a strategic plan, TAM analysis, budgeting process, or creating a diversity & inclusion strategy for the company.
• An experimental project that won’t distract the current team
  One final area where you might consider on-demand work is for a project that feels more like an addendum to your current business, or an early experiment. At Bolster, we brought on an on-demand executive to help us think through and roll out a brand new product that we’re in the early days of testing right now. We’ve seen other CEOs use project-based work at the exec level for things like evaluating market expansion possibilities or speccing out the MVP of a potential new product.

This is just a short list of some of the possibilities where on-demand talent might support you in your business today. One of our favorite parts about this type of work is just that – the flexibility it offers to you and your team. Whether your business is just getting started or if you’re operating on all cylinders, don’t forget to consider on-demand work as part of your CEO toolkit for this year and beyond.

– Bethany Crystal, February 2, 2021

(This post also appeared on Bolster.com and builds on last week’s post where I introduced my new startup, Bolster)

Welcome to Bolster, the on-demand executive talent marketplace. We are creating a platform that is the new way to scale an executive team and board.

We believe that startups and scaleups are not average companies. Their rapid growth means their appetite for talent constantly outstrips their budget — and that they can’t spend months searching for it. Their dynamic industries dictate that they keep pace with bigger and better funded competitors. Their leadership teams — the people and the roles — are always changing. Their CEOs spend a ton of time hiring and coaching their leaders and shaping the complexion and direction of the team. They stress out about big expensive new executive hires when sometimes they just need to level-up an existing manager or “try before they buy.” Their Boards frequently jump in to help, but those efforts can be a little ad hoc and inefficient.

We believe that experienced executives working as consultants is the wave of the future. The number of career executives who work flexibly and on-demand for a living is skyrocketing in recent years. People are more often “between things” and are interested in plugging into shorter-term engagements while continuing to look for their next full-time role. People are retiring younger, yet wanting to keep contributing. And even fully-employed execs like to advise companies and serve on Boards. Whether these people are career consultants or are looking for a “side hustle” or just to pay something forward to a future generation of leaders, they all have two common problems: finding work is time consuming and they’re often not good at or don’t like doing it; and managing their back office, everything from insurance to legal to tax to marketing, is a drain on time that could otherwise be spent with clients or family.

We believe that a new kind of talent marketplace is needed to meet the unique and complex requirements of both audiences — the freelance, or flexible, seasoned executive, and the startup or scaleup CEO who thinks holistically about his or her leadership team and carefully tends them like a garden. We are building a platform to make instant, tailored, vetted matches between talent and companies without the randomness of a job board and without the theater, long lead times, and cost, of a full service agency 

Service marketplaces like ours work best when they help their stakeholders solve other meaningful, related problems.In this case, we believe that the need for back office services will help executive consultants focus on more important things. And we believe that CEOs need lightweight and dynamic support in thinking through the composition and skills required of their executive teams both today and 6-18 months in the future.

That is the essence of the business we are building. A business to quickly match awesome companies with awesome freelance executives and to help both sides be better at what they do. We are here to make it easier for you to:

• Bolster your executive team. For our Clients, our pledge to you is that we will quickly and cost-effectively fill the gaps in your leadership ranks (whether interim, fractional, advisory, board, or project-based) with trusted, curated talent, and that we will give you a platform to evaluate your overall leadership team and help you think through your future needs as your company evolves. Think of us as a shortcut to scaling your leadership team.
  
• Bolster your board. The best boards are the ones with multiple independent directors who come from diverse backgrounds with diverse points of view. We also pledge to our Clients that we will find great matches to help fill out their boardrooms as their strategic advisory needs change over time.
  
• Bolster your work. For our Members, our pledge to you is that we will find you the right kind of interesting clients and help you manage your back office so you can focus on your work (and all the other important things in your life!).
  
• Bolster your portfolio. For our Portfolio Partners, VC and PE board members, our pledge to you is that we will make it easier for you and your firm to both drive successful on-demand executive placements for your portfolio company CEOs, and to manage and expand your firm’s network of flexible executive talent. 

We are an experienced team of entrepreneurs and operators who have scaled multiple businesses throughout our careers. All of us worked together as part of the leadership team at Return Path, a leading email technology company that we scaled from 0 to $100mm in revenue and 500 employees in 12 locations around the world while winning numerous Employer of Choice awards. All of us have independent experience scaling other businesses, small and large, public and private. All of us have experience being on-demand executives as well — whether interim, fractional, advisory, project-based, or board roles, we know the landscape of both our members and our clients. 

We’ve all dealt with the stress of having product-market fit and market opportunities but not being able to capitalize on those opportunities because we were missing key talent. And we’ve tried everything from executive search firms (expensive, time-consuming, and slow), to leveling up people (will they be able to grow into the role?), to leaning in to our board (hit or miss, inefficient). Heck, we’ve been desperate enough to follow up on the “my cousin’s boyfriend has an uncle, and he might know someone” lead.

We believe there is a better way for startups and scaleups to find executive talent. Along the way, I published a book about scaling startups called Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business that has sold over 40,000 copies to CEOs around the world. And our whole team is working on a new book called Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Teams, which is coming out in early 2021. Our team has a maniacal focus on helping startup teams scale and flourish and on helping leaders develop into the best version of themselves. That’s what we’re all about. 
Plus, we have an amazing group of investors behind us who know how to grow businesses like ours and have incredible reach into the startup and scaleup world. More about that later. For now, we are excited to soft launch Bolster and begin unleashing the power of on-demand executive talent to our Clients. Thank you for being on this journey with us. If you’re interested in the somewhat unusual story of how the company was founded, it’s here.

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 that stand out in your mind?

3.       When our EC was at its best, what were the team dynamics that caused it to function so well?

I got some wonderful responses, including one which productively challenged the premise of asking backward-looking questions as I was trying to reboot for the future.  (The answer is that this was one of several things I was doing as part of Rebooting, not the only thing, and historical perspective is one of many useful tools.)

Although the question clearly led itself to this, the common theme across all the answers was “back to basics.”  Part of evolving myself as a CEO as the company has grown over the years has been stopping doing particular things and starting others intentionally.  I try to do that at least once a year.  But what this particular exercise taught me is that, like the proverbial boiled frog, there were a slew of small and medium-sized things that I’ve stopped doing over the years unintentionally that are positive and productive habits that I miss.  I have a long list of these items, and I probably won’t want or need to get to all of them.  But there are a few that I think are critical to my success for various reasons.  Some of the more noteworthy ones are:

• Blogging, which I mentioned in last week’s post as an important way for me to reflect and crystallize my thinking on specific topics
• Ensuring that I have enough open time on my calendar to breathe, think, keep current with things.  When every minute of every day is scheduled, I am working harder, but not smarter
• Be more engaged with people at the office.  This relates to having open time on the calendar.  Yesterday I sat in our kitchen area and had a quick lunch with a handful of colleagues who I don’t normally interact with.  It was such a nice break from my routine of “sit at desk, order food in” or “important business lunch,” I got to clear my head a little bit, and I got to know a couple things about a couple people in the office that I didn’t previously know
• Get closer to the front lines internally.  Although I’ve maintained good external contacts as the company has grown with key clients and partners, our multi-business-unit structure has had me too disconnected from Sales and Engineering/Product in particular.  This one may take a couple months to enact, but I need to get closer to the action internally to truly understand what’s going on in the business
• Get back to a rigorous use of a single Operating System.  I’ve written a lot about this over the years, but having a David-Allen style, single place where I track all critical to do’s for me and for my team has always been bedrock for me.  I’ve been experimenting with some different ways of doing this over the last couple years, which has led to a breakdown in Allen’s main principle of “put it all in one place” – so I am going to work on fixing that
• Reading – while I have been consistently and systematically working my way through American history and Presidential biographies books over the years, I’ve almost entirely stopped reading other books for lack of time.  A well-balanced reading diet is critical for me.  So I’m working in some other books now from the other genres I love – humor (Martini Wonderland is awesome), architecture (see last week’s post on The Fountainhead), current events (I’m in the middle of Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project and next up is Tom Friedman’s Thank You For Being Late), and business books (about to start Kotter’s A Sense of Urgency)
• Like reading, doing something creative and unrelated to work has always been an important part of keeping my brain fresh.  Coaching little league has helped a lot.  But I need to add something that’s more purely creative.  I am still deciding between taking guitar lessons (I halfway know how to play) and sculpting lessons (I don’t know a thing about it)

That’s it for now.  There are other basics that I never let lapse (for example, exercise).  But the common theme of the above, I realize now that I am writing it all out, isn’t only “back to basics.”  It’s about creating time and space for me to be fresh and exercise different muscles instead of grinding it out all day, every day.  And that’s well worth the few minutes it took me and my friends to work up this list!

Hopefully I’ll have more to say on the general topic of rebooting in another week or two as January craziness sets in with our annual kickoff meetings around the world.

How to Ask For a Raise

I’m guessing this topic will get some good play, both internally at Return Path and externally.  It’s an important topic for many reasons, although one of the best ones I can think of is that most people aren’t comfortable asking for raises (especially women and more introverted people, according to lots of research as well as Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In).

My whole point in writing this is to make compensation part of normal conversations between a manager and a team member.  This requires the manager making it comfortable (without negative stigma), and the employee approaching it maturely.

My guess is that the two most common ways most people ask for raises when they bother to do so are (1) they get another job offer and try to get their current employer to match, or (2) they come to their boss with a very emotional appeal about how hard they are working, or that they heard Sally down the hall makes more money than they do, and that’s not fair.  Although either one may work (particularly the first one), there’s a better way to think about the whole process that removes the emotion and produces a better outcome for both employer and company.

Compensation is fundamentally a data-driven process for companies.  The high-level data inputs are the size of payroll, the amount of aggregate increase the company can afford, and the framework for distributing that aggregate increase by department or by level of performance.  A second set of position- or person-specific data looks at performance within a level, promotions, and internal leveling, and external comparables.  Fundamentally, smart companies will approach compensation by paying people fairly (both internally and externally) to do their jobs so they keep their best people from looking for new jobs because of compensation.

If compensation is a data-driven process for companies, employees should treat asking for raises as a data-driven process, too.  How can you go about that?  What data can you bring to a compensation conversation with your manager to make it go as smoothly as possible?

1. Let your manager know ahead of time that you’d like to discuss your compensation at your next 1:1, so he or she is prepared for that topic to come up.Blindsiding will never result in a calm and collected conversation.
2. Be mindful of the company’s compensation cycle timing.  If the company has an annual process and you are just about to hit it (within 2-3 months), then consider carefully whether you want to ask for a raise off-cycle, or whether you just want to give your manager data to consider for the company’s normal cycle.  If you’re really off-cycle (e.g., 4-8 months away), then you should note to your manager that you’re specifically asking for off-cycle consideration
3. Bring internal data:  your most recent performance review or ratings as well as any other specific feedback or praise you’ve received from your manager, colleagues, or senior people.  See below for one additional thought on internal data
4. Bring external data:  bring in compensation and job requirement and scope data from multiple online sources, or even from recruiters if you’ve been called recently and asked about comp and scope of roles.  The most important parts here are the two I bolded – you can’t just bring in a single data point, and you also have to include detailed job scope and requirements to make your point.  If you only find one data point that supports a raise, expect your manager or HR team to counter with five that don’t.  If you bring in examples that aren’t truly comparable (the title is right, but the scope is way off, or the job requirements call for 10 years of experience when you have 5), then expect your manager to call you out on that
5. Recognize that cash compensation is only one part of the mix.  Obviously an important part, but not the only part.  Incentive compensation, equity, perks (gym membership, healthcare, etc. – they all add up!), and even company environment and lifestyle are all important considerations and important levers to pull in terms of your total compensation
6. Have the conversation in a non-emotional manner.  State your position clearly and unambiguously – you feel you deserve a raise of Q because of X, Y, and Z.  Tell your manager that you enjoy your job and the company and want to continue working there, fairly paid and amply motivated.  Don’t threaten to quit if you don’t get your way, leave the acrimony at the door, set a follow-up date for the next conversation to give your manager time to think about it and discuss it with HR, and be careful about citing your colleagues’ compensation (see next point)

The one piece of data that’s tricky to surface is internal comparables.  Even the most transparent organizations usually treat compensation data as confidential.  Now, most companies are also not idiots, and they realize that people probably talk about compensation at the water cooler.  But bringing up a specific point like “I know what Sally makes, and I make less, and that’s not fair” is likely to agitate a manager or executive because of the confidentiality of compensation.  However, as one point among many, simply asking your manager, “do you feel like my compensation is fair relative to internal comparables for both my position and performance?” and even asking questions like “which positions internally do you think are good comparables for my compensation?” are both fair game and will make your point in a less confrontational or compromising manner.

Managers, how can you best handle situations where employees come in to discuss their compensation with you?

1. Most important are two things you can do proactively here.  First, be sure to set a tone with your team that they should always be comfortable talking to you about compensation openly and directly.  That you might or might not agree with them, but the conversation is safe – remove the stigma.  Second, be proactive yourself.  Make sure you’re in touch with market rates for the roles on your team.  Make sure you’re rewarding high performers with more responsibility and more money.  And make sure you don’t let “job scope creep” happen where you just load up your good people quietly with more responsibility and don’t officially change their scope/title/comp
2. If the employee does not more or less follow the steps above and approach this in a planful, non-emotional way, I’d suggest stopping him before the conversation gets more than one or two sentences in.  Empathize with his concern, hand him a copy of this blog post, and tell him to come back in a week ready to talk.  That saves both of you from an unnecessarily uncomfortable conversation, and it gives you time to prepare as well (see next item)
3. If the employee does more or less follow the steps above and approaches this rationally, then listen, empathize, take good notes, and agree to the follow-up meeting.  Then sit with your manager or department head or HR to review the data surfaced by the employee, develop your own data-driven perspective, and respond in the meeting with the employee with data, regardless of your response.  If you do give a raise, the data makes it less about “I like you.”  If you don’t, you can emphasize the employee’s importance to you and steer the discussion towards “how to make more money in the future” by expanding role scope or improving performance

I hope this advice is helpful for both managers and employees.  Compensation is a weird topic – one of the weirdest at companies, but it need not be so awkward for people to bring up.

I used to describe our culture and our employees and our leaders at Return Path as a family.

That was a mistake. It was just plain wrong. It served us well in some respects, but it bit us in the ass on others.

Great groupings of people at work are teams, not families. You can have a highly functional family. But you don’t have high performing families. Work teams need to be high performing.

Here’s what I mean.

The family metaphor worked well at Return Path around the principles of caring for people and lifting each other up. Those elements of a culture are absolutely critical. I don’t regret them for a minute.

But the downside of that metaphor is that families by definition stay families. Sure, spouses can get divorced, but usually not after years of trying to make it work. And kids and parents can’t stop being relatives. Families also don’t typically have metrics and have a structural impetus to improve how they relate to each other, or to some kind of tangible output.

The practical problem with the family metaphor comes down to holding on to people too long when those people aren’t performing well. While I am a big believer that past high performance is both an indicator of future high performance and earns you as an employee a little extra grace when something goes wrong, those things can’t be absolute in business, and they have a clock on them. High performing businesses go the extra mile for their people when their people are going through a rough patch in their lives, and they should be willing to invest in coaching and development when their people need a boost or some kind of corrective action. But not indefinitely.

So even with all the caring and lifting each other up…the family is just the wrong metaphor for a business.

Here’s why the team is the right one, and I’ll use the language of sports teams here a bit more than I normally do.

Teams train together. They have a common goal, which is winning. They know that they are only as good as their weakest link. They have leaders like coaches, managers, GMs, and captains, who they look to for guidance and direction. They are disappointed when they fall short of their goals.

But — and this is the critical learning — the best teams, the highest performing teams in the world, don’t only focus on performance, metrics, and improvement. They care about their people and lift them up. Sure, there are winning teams with tyrannical bosses like the 1970s Yankees. But would you have rather been on one of the George Steinbrenner/Billy Martin teams, or worked for Joe Torre or even Joe Girardi?

The best groupings of people at work are high performing teams…AND they care about each other as people. They just don’t care about each other as people to the detriment of the team, at least not longer than a very brief cure period would allow when something goes sideways.

You can lead your organization to have the orientation of a team, with some of the best elements of families. But not the other way around.

B+ for Effort?

Effort is important in life.  If Woody Allen is right, and 80% of success in life is just showing up, then perhaps 89% is in showing up AND putting in good effort.  But there is no A for Effort in a fast-paced work environment.  The best you can get without demonstrating results is a B+.

The converse is also true, that the best you can get with good results AND without good effort is a B+.

Now, a B+ isn’t a bad grade either way.  But it’s not the best grade.  In continuing with this series of our 13 core values at Return Path, the next one I’ll cover is:

We believe that results and effort are both critical components of execution

We’ve always espoused the general philosophy that HOW you get something done is quite important.  For example, if the effort is poor and you get to the right place, maybe you got lucky.  Or even worse, maybe you wasted a lot of time to get there.  Or if you burned your colleagues or clients in the process of getting to the right place, a positive short-term result can have negative long-term consequences.

But when all is said and done, even with the most supportive culture that values effort and learning a lot (more on that in the next post in this series), results speak very loudly. Customers don’t give you a lot of credit for trying hard if you’re not effectively delivering product or solving their problems.  And investors ultimately demand results.

Our “talent development” framework at Return Path – the thing that we use to measure employee performance, reflects this dual view of execution:

The X axis is clearly labeled “Performance,” meaning results, and the Y axis is labeled “Potential – RP Expectations,” which basically means effort and fit with the culture at Return Path.  We plot out employees on the basis of their quantitative scores coming out of their performance reviews on this grid every year.  Which box any given employee falls in has a lot to do with how that employee is managed and coached in the coming months.  We’re always trying to move people up and to the right!

The definitions of the different boxes in this framework are telling and speak to the subject of this post.  To be an A player here, you have to excel in both effort and results – that’s our definition of successful execution.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!  We’re getting to the end of this series…only two more to go.

How to Wow Your Manager

Last week, I talked about how to Wow your employees.  Now I am going to discuss the converse of that – How to Wow your Manager.  Why Wow your manager?  Even if you are senior leader in an organization, the Wow factor is still important.

What impact does a Wow have?  It sends the signal that you are on top of things.  Symbolism is important.  It also advances the cause further and faster.  Why do you want to foster Wow moments with your team?  High performing teams have a lot of Wow going on.  If all members of a team see Wow regularly, they are all inspired to do more sooner, better.

Here are my top 10 examples on how to WOW your manager, along with the intended impact:

1. Show up for every check-in with the full agenda – send it a day or more ahead (Give your manager time and space to prepare)
2.  When you are asking your manager to communicate something (an email to the team, a reference letter, etc.), draft it for him or her (Editing is much easier than creating)
3.  Do a start-stop-continue analysis once a year on all of your key activities (Make yourself as efficient and effective as possible – that’s your responsibility as much as your manager’s)
4.  Own your own development plan and check in on it at least quarterly (Those who own their own career paths progress more quickly down them)
5. Read a relevant business book and ask your manager to discuss insights with you (Staying current with best practices in your field – books, articles, blog posts, videos, mentors, lectures –  is key in a learning organization)
6.  Dress for success – even casual can be neat and “client ready” (Your presence has an impact on those around you.  There’s no reason anyone should ever have to comment on your clothes, your hair, or any aspect of your personal hygiene)
7. Respond to every email where you are on the TO line within a day, even if it’s to say you will respond longer form later (At Return Path,  you have to be in the jet stream of communications. Otherwise, you find yourself in the exhaust of the jet stream)
8. End every meaningful interaction by asking for informal feedback on how you’re doing and what else you can be doing (Again, part of being in a learning organization…and taking more tasks on is always a sign that you are ready for more responsibility)
9. Do something that’s not required but that you feel is a best practice (This shows you’re on top of your game.  One example:  I send the Board a summary, the details, and the YoY trending of all of my expenses every year.  I don’t have to, but enough CEOs out there have high profile expense problems that I decided it’s a good practice.  They all LOVE it)
10.  (If you have staff reporting into you) Show up for every check-in with  your manager with a list of all staff issues and highlights (You need to bubble things up, both good and bad, so your manager is on top of his or her overall team and (a) is never surprised by events, (b) knows how best to handle skip-level communications, and (c) can think more broadly about resource deployment across the organization)

Book Short:  Great Marketing Checklists

Trade Show and Event Marketing:  Plan, Promote, and Profit, by our direct marketing colleague Ruth Stevens, is hardly a page-turner, but it is a great read and well worth the money for anyone in your B2B marketing department.  That’s true as much for the event marketing specialist as the marketing generalist.

The author brings a very ROI-focused approach to planning and executing events – whether big trade shows or smaller corporate events, which are becoming increasingly popular in recent years for cost, focus, and control reasons.  But beyond events, the book has a number of excellent checklists that are more general for marketers that I found quite useful both as a reminder of things we should be doing at Return Path as well as ways we should be thinking about the different elements of our B2B marketing mix.

Some of the best tables and charts include:  strengths, weaknesses, and best applications of trade shows vs. corporate events; comparative analysis of marketing tools by channel (this was great – talks about best applications for all major tools from events to newsletters to search to inside sales); 12-month exhibitor timeline for trade shows; a great riff on bad booth signage vs. good booth signage (hint:  don’t make the visitor do the work – be obvious!); business event strategic planning grid; pre-show campaign and post-show follow-up checklists; dos, don’ts and options for corporate events; a great section on qualifying and handling leads that extends well beyond trade shows; and several good case studies that are show-focused.

Thanks to Ruth herself for an autographed copy!  Team Marketing and sales leaders at Return Path – your copies are on the way.