My 360 on Your 360
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.
Give the Gift of a 360 to Your Board of Directors
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.
In Defense of Email, Part 9,732
In Defense of Email, Part 9,732
I commented today on our partner Blue Sky Factory’s CEO, Greg Cangialosi’s excellent posting in defense of email as a marketing channel called Email’s Role and Future Thoughts. Since the comment grew longer than I anticipated, I thought I’d re-run parts of it here.
A couple quick stats from Forrester’s recent 5-year US Interactive forecast back up Greg’s points con gusto:
– 94% of consumers use email; 16% use social networking sites (and I assume they mean USE them – not just get solicitations from their friends to join). That doesn’t mean that social networking sites aren’t growing rapidly in popularity, at least in some segments of the population, and it doesn’t mean that email marketing may not be the best way to reach certain people at certain times. But it does mean that email remains the most ubiquitous online channel, not to mention the most “pull-oriented” and “on demand.”
– Spend on email marketing is $2.7b this year, growing to $4.2b in 2012. Sure, email by 2012 is the smallest “category” by dollars spent, but first of all, one of the categories is “emerging channels,” which looks like it includes “everything else” in the world other than search, video, email, and display. So it includes mobile as well as social media, and who knows what else. Plus, if you really understand how email marketing works, you understand that dollars don’t add up in the same way as other forms of media since so much of the work can be done in-house.
What really amazes me is how all these “web 2.0” people keep talking about how email is dying (when in fact it’s growing, albeit at a slower rate than other forms of online media) and don’t focus on how things like classifieds and yellow pages are truly DYING, and what that means for those industries.
I think a more interesting point is that in Forrester’s forecast, US Interactive Marketing spend by 2012 in aggregate reached $61b, more than triple where it is today — and that the percent of total US advertising going to interactive grows from 8 to 18 over the five years in the forecast.
The bigger question that leaves me with is what that means for the overall efficiency of ad spend in the US. It must be the case that online advertising in general is more efficient than offline — does that mean the total US advertising spend can shrink over time? Or just that as it gets more efficient,
marketers will use their same budgets to try to reach more and more prospects?
links for 2006-10-06
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Brad’s colorful, quick posting on “how running is like entrepreneurship.”
links for 2006-03-28
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Brad has a good posting today about entrepreneur accountability — along the lines of my “Forecast Early and Often” theme. — /2005/11/notsocounter_cl.html
links for 2006-03-30
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A great posting about Vendor Love from Seth Godin!
links for 2006-04-07
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Good posting from Terry Gold of Gold Systems on his experiences over the years hiring and ramping up a sales team.
links for 2006-05-10
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Amazon, Microsoft, and Google on big marketing spend
links for 2006-06-05
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Dallas Mavs owner and Internet entrepreneur Mark Cuban on Click Fraud, a notorious member of the Internet Axis of Evil
links for 2006-06-16
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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).
links for 2006-06-26
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Slice of Lime, Inc. CEO Kevin Menzie, who I have known for years, writes a good summary of his thoughts on the early days of getting a startup off the ground and growing fast!