Job 1

The first “new” post in my series of posts about Return Path’s 14 Core Values is, fittingly,

Job 1:  We are all responsible for championing and extending our unique culture as a competitive advantage.

The single most frequently asked question I have gotten internally over the last few years since we grew quickly from 100 employees to 350 has been some variant of “Are you worried about our ability to scale our culture as we hire in so many new people?”  This value is the answer to that question, though the short answer is “no.”

I am not solely responsible for our culture at Return Path. I’m not sure I ever was, even when we were small.  Neither is Angela, our SVP of People.  That said, it was certainly true that I was the main architect and driver of our culture in the really early years of the company’s life.  And I’d add that even up to an employee base of about 100 people, I and a small group of senior or tenured people really shouldered most of the burden of defining and driving and enforcing our culture and values.

But as the business has grown, the amount of responsibility that I and those few others have for the culture has shrunk as a percentage of the total.  It had to, by definition.  And that’s the place where cultures either scale or fall apart.  Companies who are completely dependent on their founder or a small group of old-timers to drive their cultures can’t possibly scale their cultures as their businesses grow.  Five people can be hands on with 100.  Five people can’t be hands on with 500.  The way we’ve been able to scale is that everyone at the company has taken up the mantle of protecting, defending, championing, and extending the culture.  Now we all train new employees in “The RP Way.”  We all call each other out when we fail to live up to our values.  And the result is that we have done a great job of scaling our culture with our business.

I’d also note that there are elements of our culture which have changed or evolved over the last few years as we’ve grown.  That isn’t a bad thing, as I tell old-timers all the time.  If our products stayed the same, we’d be dead in the market.  If our messaging stayed the same, we’d never sell to a new cohort of clients.  If our values stayed the same, we’d be out of step with our own reality.

Finally, this value also folds in another important concept, which is Culture as Competitive Advantage.  In an intellectual capital business like ours (or any on the internet), your business is only as good as your people.  We believe that a great culture brings in the best people, fosters an environment where they can work at the top of their games even as they grow and broaden their skills, increases the productivity and creativity of the organization’s output through high levels of collaboration, and therefore drives the best performance on a sustained basis.  This doesn’t have to be Return Path’s culture or mean that you have to live by our values.  This could be your culture and your values.  You just have to believe that those things drive your success.

Not a believer yet?  Last year, we had voluntary turnover of less than 1%.  We promoted or gave new assignments to 15% of our employees.  And almost 50% of our new hires were referred by existing employees.  Those are some very, very healthy employee metrics that lead directly to competitive advantage.  As does our really exciting announcement last week of being #11 in the mid-sized company on Fortune Magazine’s list of the best companies to work for.

Fifth in my series on creating the best place to work – Being the best enabler.  As any management guru will tell you, as you have a larger and larger team, your job is much less about getting good work done than it is enabling others to get good work done.  What does that mean?

First, don’t be a bottleneck.  You don’t have to be an Inbox-Zero nut (but feel free if you’d like), but you do need to make sure you don’t have people in the company chronically waiting on you before they can take their next actions on projects.  Otherwise, you lose all the leverage you have in hiring a team.  Don’t let approvals or requests pile up!

Second, run great meetings.  Meetings are a company’s most expensive endeavor.  Sometime in a senior staff meeting, calculate the cost in salary of everyone sitting there for an hour or two!  Run good meetings yourself and don’t enable bad behavior…and in the course of doing that, role model the same for your senior staff members who do their own staff or team meetings.  Make sure your meetings are as short as possible, as actionable as possible, and as interesting as possible.  Don’t hold a meeting when an email or 5-minute recorded message will suffice.  Don’t hold a weekly standing meeting when it can be biweekly.  Cancel meetings if there’s nothing to cover.  End them early if you can’t fill the time productively.  Vary the tempo of your meetings to match their purpose – the same staff group can have a weekly with one agenda, a monthly with a different agenda, and a quarterly with a different agenda.

Finally, don’t run a hub-and-spoke system of communications.  Some managers who are a bit command-and-control like hoarding information or forcing all communication to go through them or surface in staff meetings.  No need for that!  Almost everyone on your team, if you are a senior manager, should have individual bilateral relationships and regular 1:1 meetings without you there.  The same goes for your Board and your staff, if you are the CEO.  They should have individual relationships that don’t go through you.  if you are a choke point for communication, it’s just as bad as being a bottleneck for approvals.

Enabling your team to give it their all is a gift to yourself and your organization as much as it is a gift to your team – give that gift early and often.

You Can’t Teach a Cat How to Bark, But You Might be Able to Teach it How to Walk on its Hind Legs

My co-founder George and I have had this saying for a while.  Cats don’t bark.  They can’t.  Never will.  They also don’t usually walk on their hind legs in the wild, but some of them, after some training, could probably be taught to do so.

Working with people on career evolution sometimes follows that same path.  Lots of the time, an employee’s career evolution is natural and goes well.  They’re playing to their strengths, in their sweet spot, progressing along nicely.  But often that’s not the case.  And it goes both ways.  Some employees want something different.  The sales rep wants to be a sales manager.  The product manager wants to try marketing.  Sometimes the organization needs something different out of the person.  Be a stronger manager.  Be more collaborative.  Acquire more domain or functional expertise.

These transitions might or might not be difficult.  It completely depends on the person involved and the competencies required for the new role.  And that’s where the barking cat comes into play.  There’s more art than science here, but as a manager or as the employee, figuring out the gap between existing strengths/experience and the required competencies for the new job, and whether the missing elements *can* be taught or not is the exercise at hand.

I’m not sure there’s a useful rule of thumb here, either.  I had a boss once many years ago who said you can teach smart people how to do anything other than sales.  Another boss said you can teach anyone any fact, but you can’t teach anyone empathy.  Both of these feel too one-size-fits-all for me.  One thing we do at Return Path from time to time is encourage an employee facing some kind of stretch transition (for whatever reason) to participate in or run a short-term side project with a mentor that lets them flex some relevant new muscles.  Essentially we let them try it on for size.

The Best Laid Plans, IV

I have had a bunch of good comments from readers about the three posts in this series about creating strategic plans (input phase, analysis phase, output phase).  Many of them are leading me to write a fourth post in the series, one about how to make sure the result of the plan isn’t shelfware, but flawless execution.

There’s a bit of middleware that has to happen between the completion of the strategic plan and the work getting done, and that is an operating plan.  In my observation over the years, this is where most companies explode.  They have good ideas and capable workers, just no cohesive way to organize and contextualize the work.  There are lots of different formats operating plans can take, and a variety of acronyms to go with the formats, that I’ve heard over the years.  No one of these formats is “right,” but I’ll share the key process steps my own team and I went through just over the past few months to turn our strategic planning into action plans, synchronizing our activities across products and groups.

• Theme:  we picked a theme for the year that generally held the bulk of the key work together – a bit of a rallying cry
• Initiatives:  recognizing that lots of people do lots of routine work, we organized a series of a dozen “move the ball forward” projects into specific initiatives
• Communication:  we unveiled the theme and the initiatives to ALL at our annual business meeting to get everyone’s head around the work to be done in the upcoming year
• Plans:  each of the dozen initiative teams, and then also each team/department in the company (they’re different) worked together to produce a short (1-3 page) plan on a template we created, with a mission statement, a list of direct and indirect participants, important milestones and metrics
• Synchronization:  the senior management team reviewed all the plans at the same time and had a meaningful discussion to synchronize the plans, making edits to both substance and timing
• Scorecard:  we built our company scorecard for the year to reflect “green/yellow/red” grading on each initiative and visually display the most important 5-6 metrics across all initiatives
• Ongoing reporting:  we will publish the scorecard and updated to each initiative plan quarterly to the whole company, when we update them for Board meetings

As I said, there’s no single recipe for success here, but this is a variant on what we’ve done consistently over the years at Return Path, and it seems to be working well for us.  I think that’s the end of this series, and judging from the comments I’ve received on the blog and via email, I’m glad this was useful to so many people.

Taking Stock

Every year around this time, I take a few minutes to reflect on how the business is doing, on my goals and development plans, and on what I want to accomplish in the coming year.  Although most of that work is focused on how to move the business forward, I also make sure to take stock of my own career trajectory.  I always ask myself three questions when I do this:

1. Am I having fun at work?
2. Am I learning and growing as a professional?
3. Is my work financially rewarding enough, either in the short term or in the long term?

Of course, I always shoot for 3 YES responses.  Then I know my career is on track.  But as long as I get 2 YESses, then I feel like I’m in good shape, and I know which one to work on in the coming year.  I’m not sure I’ve ever had a situation in the dozen years of running Return Path where I’ve had 0 or 1 YESses.  If I did, I’d probably spend more time thinking about whether I was still in the right job for me.

I think these three questions can work for anyone, not just a CEO.  Hopefully everyone takes the time to take stock like this at least once a year.  It’s healthy for everyone’s career development.

Retaining good people has always been at the top of my list, even in the dark days.  But hiring and managing in an environment that’s once-stagnant-now-growing presents some real challenges.  Many of these aren’t unique to startups — it’s always tough to find A players — but there are three things I’ve observed that are uniquely tough about hiring in an entrepreneurial environment:

Keeping Commitments

Today’s post is another in the series about our 13 core values at Return Path, about making commitments.  The language of our value specifically is:

We believe in keeping the commitments we make, and we communicate obsessively when we can’t

Making and keeping commitments is not a new value – it’s one of Covey’s core principles if nothing else.  I’m sure it has deeper roots throughout the history of mankind.  But for us, this is one of those things that is hard wired into the social contract of working here.  The value is more complicated than some of the other ones we have, and although it is short, it has three components that worth breaking down:

• Making commitments:  Goal setting, whether big company-wide goals, or smaller “I’ll have it to you by Tuesday” goals, is the foundation for a well-run, aligned, and fast-paced organization
  
• Keeping commitments:  If you can’t keep the overwhelming majority of your commitments, you erode the trust of your clients or colleagues and ultimately are unable to succeed
  
• Communicating when commitments can’t be met:  Nobody is perfect.  Sometimes circumstances change, and sometimes external dependencies prevent meeting a goal.  The prior two parts of this value statement are, in my mind, pay to play.  What separates the good from the great is this third piece — owning up loud and clear when you’re in danger of blowing a goal so that those who are counting on you know how to reset their own work and expectations accordingly
  

It’s worth noting on this one that the goal is as relevant EXTERNALLY as it is INTERNALLY.  Internal commitments are key around building an organization that knows how to collaborate and hand work off from group to group.  External commitments — from meeting investor expectations to client deliverables — keep the wheels of commerce flowing.

I’m enjoying articulating these values and hope they’re helpful for both my Return Path audience and my much larger non-Return Path audience.  More to come over time.

Management by Chameleon

When I first became a manager, back in the MovieFone days, I had the good fortune to have an extreme case of “first time manager”– I went from managing nobody to managing 1 person to managing something like 20 people inside 6 months.  As a result, I feel like I learned a couple lessons more quickly than I might otherwise have learned them.  One was around micromanagement and delegation.  When I went from 0 to 1 direct report, I micromanaged (I still feel bad about that, Alissa).  But when I went from 1 to 20, I just couldn’t micromanage any more, and I couldn’t do it all myself.  I had to learn how to delegate, though I’m sure I was clumsy at it at first.

The larger lesson I learned when I went from 1 direct report to 5 (each of whom had a team underneath her) is that different people and different teams require different management styles and approaches.  This is what I call management by chameleon.  As a chameleon has the same body but shows it differently as situations warrant, you can have a consistent management philosophy but show it differently when you are with different direct reports or teams.

On my original team at MovieFone, I had one person who was incredibly quantitative and detail/process oriented and who indirectly managed a lot of products and processes outside our group.  I had another who was a complete newbie to the company and to an operating role (she was a former management consultant) with a large number of entry level employees in the field.  I had another who was an insanely creative insomniac trying to blaze new trails and create editorial content inside a technology company.  A fourth was a very broad thinking generalist, one of those great corporate athletes, who managed whatever fell between the cracks.  And the last was a commercial banker turning herself into a relationship management specialist working with an unorthodox business model and partners who half the time felt threatened by us.

In short, I had five incredibly different people to manage with five incredibly different functions and team types/employees under them.

And I learned over time — I like to think I learned it in a hurry, but I’m sure it took a couple of years, and I’m probably still working on it — that trying to manage those people and the second-level identically was counterproductive.  A small example:  8 a.m. meetings for the insomniac never worked well.  A bigger example:  diving into strategic topics with the former consultant who just joined the team and had never managed anyone before was a little bit of focusing on the forest and forgetting about the trees.

At the end of the day, you are who you are as a manager.  You are hard-charging, you are great at developing individuals, you seek consensus.  But how you show these traits to your team, and how you get your team to do the work you need them to do, can differ greatly person by person.

The iPad’s Limitations as a Business Device

I love my iPad.  Let me just start with that.  I’ve found lots of use cases for it, and it’s very useful here and there for work.  But I’ve seen a bunch of people trying to use it as a primary business device, which I can’t quite figure out.  Here are the things that prevent me from making it my main business device:

• lack of keyboard (can mitigate with the keyboard dock, which I have)
• lack of mouse (not a killer limitation, just takes some getting used to, also the arrows on the keyboard dock help)
• lack of connection to files and true Office compatibility (this can largely be mitigated through a combination of the Dropbox or Box.net app and the QuickOffice app)
• lack of multitasking (this is the main killer)

Much of the time, I need to be rapidly switching between and simultaneously using email, the web, and multiple Office documents.  Having to basically shut down each one and then fire up another instead of having them all up at once on multiple monitors or at least easily accessible via alt-tab is a big pain, especially when trying to cut and paste things from one to another.   The iPad is awesome for many many things, and for limited work usage (other than complex spreadsheets), it works “well enough.”  But I would find it difficult to make it my primary business machine other than for a fairly short (1 day) business trip.

I recently returned from a six-week sabbatical. It was fantastic. I blogged about it here if you’re curious about the experience. It turned out that, while I was gone, we had probably the most successful, least dramatic six weeks in our 10 year history. I had assumed that’s because the team buckled down while I was out, and so did our Board.

Little did we know what really happened during that six week stretch. It’s often said that when the cat’s away, the mice play. The short video below is what greeted me today at an all-hands meeting. If the team can crank out such great work and have this much fun while I’m out, well, I guess I should take more time off!

If Only International Relations Were This Easy

Iceland is one of those weird places on earth where two continental plates meet — and you can see it. Here we are, me on the American plate and Mariquita on the Eurasian plate, with the earth seemingly coming apart at the seams in between.

If anyone’s interested in a short travelog to Iceland, here it is.