My 360 on Your 360

Last year, I wrote about the 360 review process we do at Return Path, which is a great annual check-in on staff development and leadership/management.  In Part I of What a View, I described the overall process.  In Part II, I talked specifically about how my review as CEO worked, which is a little different.

This year, we changed the format of our reviews in two ways. First, for senior staff, we continued to do the live, moderated discussions, but we dropped having people also fill out the online review form.  It was duplicative, and the process already consumes enough time that we decided to cut that part out, which I think worked well. 

Second, for my review, instead of having the Board review me separately from the senior staff, I combined efforts and had all of them participate in my live moderated discussion together.  I also think this worked well, although we did receive some feedback about how to modify the format slightly for next year.  It was great for the Board to get a window into how the team feels about me, and vice versa, and it produced a single, unified development plan for me, which is much more helpful than two sets of feedback about different questions and issues.

The one theme that came out of this year’s live reviews, which is definitely worth thinking about, is the impact of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, that once something is observed, the act of observing it can actually change it.  Because the live discussions are face to face (anonymous to the person being reviewed, but not anonymous among the reviewers), some people mentioned that they were conscious of what they were saying in the presence of others in the company.  Others didn’t particularly care about that but did say things that could be construed as negative about some of their fellow reviewers.  Someone came up to me after one session and said "I wonder what the rest of the group thought of my comments — I need a 360 on your 360!"

The reality is that transparency is a good thing.  There shouldn’t be any state secrets about someone’s performance, especially when the person is in a senior management position.  All people always have things they can improve upon, and the open discussion around what they are and why they happen produce MUCH better results for the people being reviewed, uncomfortable as it may be at times.

The sessions are confidential, so participants should feel comfortable that their thoughts won’t be shared outside the room.  Plus, we provide a mechanism to give feedback that really is hard to provide in public for whatever reason via email or one-on-one conversations with the moderator.

New Del.icio.us for: Tag

As usual the laggard behind Fred and Brad, I just set up a for:mattblumberg tag on del.icio.us.  Feel free to tag away for me!  If you don’t know what this means, you can read either of their postings about it here or here.

The Gift of Feedback, Part IV

I wrote a few weeks ago about my live 360 – the first time I’ve ever been in the room for my own review discussion.  I now have a development plan drafted coming out of the session, and having cycled it through the contributors to the review, I’m ready to go with it.  As I did in 2008, 2009, and 2011, I’m posting it here publicly.  This time around, there are three development items:

1. Continue to spend enough time in-market.  In particular, look for opportunities to spend more time with direct clients.  There was a lot of discussion about this at my review.  One director suggested I should spend at least 20% of my time in-market, thinking I was spending less than that.  We track my time to the minute each quarter, and I spend roughly 1/3 of my time in-market.  The problem is the definition of in-market.  We have a lot of large partners (ESPs, ISPs, etc.) with whom I spend a lot of time at senior levels.  Where I spend very little time is with direct clients, either as prospects or as existing clients.  Even though, given our ASP, there isn’t as much leverage in any individual client relationship, I will work harder to engage with both our sales team and a couple of larger accounts to more deeply understand our individual client experience.
2. Strengthen the Executive Committee as a team as well as using the EC as the primary platform for driving accountability throughout the organization.  On the surface, this sounds like “duh,” isn’t that the CEO’s job in the first place?  But there are some important tactical items underneath this, especially given that we’ve changed over half of our executive team in the last 12 months.  I need to keep my foot on the accelerator in a few specific ways:  using our new goals and metrics process and our system of record (7Geese) rigorously with each team member every week or two; being more authoritative about the goals that end up in the system in the first place to make sure my top priorities for the organization are being met; finishing our new team development plan, which will have an emphasis on organizational accountability; and finding the next opportiunity for our EC to go through a management training program as a team.
3. Help stakeholders connect with the inherent complexity of the business.  This is an interesting one.  It started out as “make the business less complex,” until I realized that much of the competitive advantage and inherent value from our business comes fom the fact that we’ve built a series of overlapping, complex, data machines that drive unique insights for clients.  So reducing complexity may not make sense.  But helping everyone in and around the business connect with, and understand the complexity, is key.  To execute this item, there are specifics for each major stakeholder.  For the Board, I am going to experiment with a radically simpler format of our Board Book.  For Investors, Customers, and Partners, we are hard at work revising our corporate positioning and messaging.  Internally, there are few things to work on — speaking at more team/department meetings, looking for other opportunities to streamline the organization, and contemplating a single theme or priority for 2015 instead of our usual 3-5 major priorities.

Again, I want to thank everyone who participated in my 360 this year – my board, my team, a few “lucky” skip-levels, and my coach Marc Maltz.  The feedback was rich, the experience of observing the conversation was very powerful, and I hope you like where the development plan came out!

Give the Gift of a 360 to Your Board of Directors

I recently ran our biennial Board 360, and I thought it would be interesting to share the details.  Attached are a few pages from, my book, Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business  which describe the process as well as share the survey I developed, which I adapted from one that the legendary Bill Campbell uses at larger public companies like Intuit.

If you’ve read this blog a lot over the years, you know that we are big on 360s for staff at all levels at Return Path , and at some point a few years ago, I thought, “hmmm, shouldn’t we do this for the Board as well?”

Most of our directors had never been part of one before as Board members, and they reacted to it with varying levels of interest and trepidation.  But all of them loved the output and the discussion we had afterwards.  Extending the level of transparency we have internally to the Board was a great thing and a great use of time, and I think making the Board members review themselves and their peers critically and then seeing the results sharpened overall Board performance.

The document also shares the survey we use, which we have each director take anonymously and compile the results to share in Executive Session at a Board meeting.  We also ask a few members of the senior management team to fill out the survey as well so the Board gets feedback from them, too.

• Not all successful CEOs are extroverts: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance
  Brad tipped me off to this article — it’s a good one and draws on a lot of the work and thinking done by Jim Collins in both Good to Great and Built to Last (links to both books on my blog in the books sidebar).
  (tags: Books Entrepreneur Management)

• Fractals of Change: Are You an Entrepreneur?
  Tom Evslin’s entertaining Top 10 Ways You Know You’re an Entrepreneur. Some may dovetail nicely if I ever write up my read of The Fountainhead through entrepreneurial lens!
  (tags: Entrepreneur VC)

• Feld Thoughts
  Brad has a good posting today about entrepreneur accountability — along the lines of my “Forecast Early and Often” theme. — /2005/11/notsocounter_cl.html
  (tags: VC Entrepreneur)

• Seth’s Blog: Going to meetings
  A great posting about Vendor Love from Seth Godin!
  (tags: Entrepreneur)

• terrygold.com: Hiring Salespeople
  Good posting from Terry Gold of Gold Systems on his experiences over the years hiring and ramping up a sales team.
  (tags: Entrepreneur Sales Management)

• The Growth Guy: Nine tricks buyers use to “steal” your company
  Really thorough posting (battle scars *may* be present based on the level of detail) about how to best position your company for sale.
  (tags: Entrepreneur VC)

• WSJ.com – Heard on the Street
  Amazon, Microsoft, and Google on big marketing spend
  (tags: Marketing Media Technology)