Counter Cliche:  Failure Is Not an Orphan

I haven’t written one of these for a while, but this week, Fred’s VC Cliche of the Week, Success Has a Thousand Fathers, definitely merits an entrepreneurial point of view.  Fred’s main point is right — it’s very easy when something goes right, whether a company/venture deal or even something inside the company like a good quarter or a big new client win, for lots of people to take credit, many of whom don’t deserve it.

But what separates A companies from B and C companies is the ability to recognize and process failures as well as successes.  Failure is not orphan.  It usually has as many real fathers as success.  Although it’s true that Sometimes, There is No Lesson to Be Learned, failure rarely emerges spontaneously. 

Companies that have a culture of blame and denial eventually go down in flames.  They are scary places to work.  They foster in-fighting between departments and back-stabbing among friends.  Most important, companies like that are never able to learn from their mistakes and failures to make sure those things don’t happen again.

Finger-pointing and looking the other way as things go south have no place in a well-run organization.  While companies don’t necessarily need to celebrate failures, they can create a culture where failures are treated as learning experiences and where claiming responsibility for a mistake is a sign of maturity and leadership.  And all of this starts at the top.  If the boss (CEO, department head, line manager) is willing to step up and acknowledge a mistake, do a real post-mortem, and process the learnings with his or her team without fear of retribution, it sets an example that everyone in the organization can follow.

Run, Brad, Run!

A few years ago we announced our support of a charity called the Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis (see the post about it here and learn more about Accelerated Cure here).  While we have a strong culture of giving back to the community at Return Path and do that in several ways, we chose this charity as the main beneficiary of our corporate philanthropy efforts for three reasons:

1. We wanted to support research into finding a cure for MS to honor and support one of our earliest colleagues, Sophie Miller Audette who was diagnosed with MS about 5 years ago (and is still going strong as one of our key sales directors!) – and since then, two other members of the Return Path extended family have also been diagnosed with MS
2. We wanted to support an organization with a focused mission and one where our contributions could really make a difference
3. Accelerated Cure has a very entrepreneurial, innovative culture that’s consistent with our own – and a solution-oriented approach to their cause that resonates with our business philosophy

We got introduced to Accelerated Cure by Brad Feld, one of Return Path’s venture investors, who is a friend of Art Mellor, Accelerated Cure’s founder and CEO.  Brad’s an interesting guy for many reasons, but one reason is that he has a goal of running 50 marathons (one in each state) by the time he’s 50.  He has eight years and 40 marathons to go, and to make it a little more significant he decided to try and drum up some sponsorships for his quest and donate the money to Accelerated Cure. 

Return Path has decided to be one of Brad’s anchor tenant sponsors by pledging $1,000 for every race he completes.  This is half of Brad’s goal of $2,000 per race, and we hope it will inspire others to donate so he can beat his goal.  Of course, Brad wants to do more than just run these marathons – he wants to, well, accelerate his performance.  So, taking a page out of the VC handbook, we’re setting up an incentive program for Brad of an additional $500 donation for every race that he completes in less than four hours. 

Besides liking both Brad and Accelerated Cure, this particular vehicle for donating money is especially meaningful to us.  A good number of Return Path employees past and present have run marathons and even competed in triathlons and Ironman competitions (including yours truly, but in a way that certainly makes me want to keep my day job).  And Seth Matheson, Accelerated Cure’s new development director who has MS, is an avid marathoner who is contemplating an Ironman competition himself.  And as I always tell our team members, running a startup is a marathon, not a sprint!

You can follow Brad’s progress – and make a donation yourself – here.

How to Wow Your Employees

Here at Return Path we like to promote a culture of WOW and a culture of hospitality.  Some of you may be asking, Why Wow your employees?   The answer is, there is nothing more inspirational than showing an employee that you care about him or her as an individual.  The impact a WOW has is tremendous.  Being a manger is like being in a fishbowl.  Everything you do is scrutinized by your team.  You lead by example whether you want to or not and showing your own vulnerability/humanity has an amazing bonding effect.

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 and better.

Here are 15 ways to Wow your employees

1. Take them or her to lunch/breakfast/drinks/dinner quarterly individually, one nice one per year
2. Learn their hobbies and special interests; when you have a spiff to give, give one that is in line with these
3. Remember the names of their spouse/significant other/kids/pets
4. Share your development plan with them and ask for input against it at least quarterly
5. Respond to every email from your staff by the end of the day; sooner if you are on the TO line
6. Ask them what they think of a piece of work you’re doing
7. Ask them what they think of the direction the company is going, or a specific project
8. Periodically take something off each one’s plate, even if it’s clearly theirs to do
9. Periodically tell them to take a day off to recharge, ideally around something important in their lives
10. End every meaningful interaction by asking how they are doing and feeling about work
11. End every interaction by asking what you can be doing to help them do a better job and advance their career
12. Read all job openings and highlight ones that match their interests for future positions
13. Read the weekly award list and call out those FROM and TO your team in staff meetings
14. Send a handwritten note to their home when you have a moment of appreciation for them
15. (If your employee has a team he/she manages) Ask for input before every skip-level interaction and summarize each one after the fact in an email or in person

I try to have Wow moments regularly with people at all levels in the organization.  Here’s one that sticks with me.  At the Colorado summer party several years ago, I went up to someone who was a few layers down in the organization and said hi to her husband and dog by name.  I had met them before, and I work at remembering these things.  The husband was blown away – I hadn’t talked to him in probably two years.  In front of the employee, he gushed – “this is exactly why my wife loves working here – we are totally committed to being part of the RP family.”

There are as many ways to be a great manager and WOW your employees as there are stars in the sky…hopefully these ideas give you a framework to make these your own!

Fig Wasp #879

I have 7 categories of books in my somewhat regular reading rotation:  Business (the only one I usually blog about), American History with a focus on the founding period, Humor, Fiction with a focus on trash, Classics I’ve Missed, Architecture and Urban Planning (my major), and Evolutionary Biology.  I’m sure that statement says a lot about me, though I am happy to not figure it out until later in life.  Anyway, I just finished another fascinating Richard Dawkins book about evolution, and while I usually don’t blog about non-business books, this one had an incredibly rich metaphor with several business lessons stemming from it, plus, evolution is running rampant in our household this week, so I figured, what the heck?

The Dawkins books I’ve read are The Selfish Gene (the shortest, most succinct, and best one to start with), The Blind Watchmaker (more detail than the first), Climbing Mount Improbable (more detail than the second, including a fascinating explanation of how the eye evolved “in an evolutionary instant”), The Ancestor’s Tale (very different style – and a great journey back in time to see each fork in the evolutionary road on the journey from bacteria to humanity), and The God Delusion (a very different book expounding on Dawkins’ theory of atheism).  All are great and fairly easy to read, given the topic.  I’d start with either The Selfish Gene or maybe The Ancestor’s Tale if you’re interested in taking him for a spin.

So on to the tale of Fig Wasp #879, from this week’s read, Climbing Mount Improbable.  Here’s the thing.  There are over 900 kinds of fig trees in the world.  Who knew?  I was dimly aware there was such a thing as a fig tree, although quite frankly I’m most familiar with the fig in its Newton format.  Some species reproduce wildly inefficiently — like wild grasses, whose pollen get spread through the air, and with a lot of luck, 1 in 1 billion (with a “b”) land in the right place at the right time to propagate.  At the opposite end of the spectrum stands the fig tree.  Not only do fig trees reproduce by relying on the collaboration of fig wasps to transport their pollen from one to the next, but it turns out that not only are there over 900 different kinds of fig trees on earth, there are over 900 different kinds of fig wasps — one per tree species.  The two have evolved together over thousands of millenia, and while we humans might take the callous and uninformed view that a fig tree is a fig tree, clearly the fig wasps have figured out how to swiftly and instinctively differentiate one speices from another.

So what the heck does this have to do with business?  Three quick lessons come mind.  I’m sure there are scores more.

1. Collboration only works when each party benefits selfishly from it.  Fig wasps don’t cross-pollenate fig trees bcause the fig trees ask nicely or will fire them if they don’t.  They do their job because their job is independently fulfilling.  If they don’t — they probably die of starvation.  They’re just programmed with a very specific type of fig pollen as their primary input and output.  We should all think about collaboration this way at work.  I wrote a series of posts a couple years back on the topic of Collboration Being Hard, and while all the points I make in those posts are valid, I think this one trumps all.  Quite frankly, it calls on the core principle from the Harvard Project on Negotiation, which is that collaboration requires a rethinking of the pie, so that you can expand the pie.  That’s what the fig trees and fig wasps have done, unwittingly.  Each one gets what it needs far more so than if it had ever consulted directly with the other.  The lesson:  Be selfish, but do it in a way that benefits your company.

2. Incredibly similar companies can have incredibly distinct cultures.  900+ types of fig tree, each one attracting one and only one type of fig wasp.  Could there be anything less obvious to the untrained human eye?  I assume that not only would most of us not be able to discern one tree or wasp type from another, but that we wouldn’t be able to disdcern discern any of the 900+ types of trees or wasps from thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions (in the case or urbanites) types of trees or bugs in general!  But here’s the thing.  I know hundreds of internet companies.  Heck, I know dozens of email companies.  And I can tell you within 5 minutes of walking around the place or meeting an executive which ones I’d be able to work for, and which ones I wouldn’t.  And the older/bigger the company, the more distinct and deeply rooted its culture becomes.  The lessons:  don’t go to work for a company where you’d even remotely uncomfortable in the interview environment; cultivate your company’s culture with same level of care and attention to detail that you would your family — regardless of your role or level in the company!

3. Leadership is irrelevant when the operating system is tight.  You think fig wasps have a CEO?  Or a division president who reports into the CEO that oversees both fig wasps and fig trees, making sure they all cross-pollenate before the end of the quarter?  Bah.  While as a CEO, you may be the most important person in the organization sometimes, or in some ways, I can easily construct the argument that you’re the least important person in the shop as well.  If you do your job and create an organization where everyone knows the mission, the agenda, the goal, the values, the BHAG, whatever you want to call it — withoutit needing to be spelled out every day — you’ve done your job, because you’ve made a company where people rock ‘n’ roll all night and every day without you needing to be in the middle of what they’re doing. 

I’m sure there are other business lessons from evolutionary biology…send them along if you have good thoughts to share!

One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that as the organization scales, you have to be all-in, until you’re not.  What the heck does that mean?

It means that, other than confiding your indecision to a very small number of trusted advisors on a given issue, indecision is poison to the people around you and to the organization in general.  So even if you’re thinking of doing something new or different or making a tough call on something, you generally need to project confidence until you’ve made the call.

One example of this is around a decision to fire someone on the team, especially a senior executive.  Public indecision about this reminds me of years ago when George Steinbrenner owned the Yankees.  Every time he contemplated firing a manager, which was often, he was very public about it.  It turned the manager into a lame duck, ignored by players and mocked by the press.  No good for the manager or for the players, unhelpful for the team as a whole.  It’s the same in business.  Again, other than a small group of trusted advisors, your people have to have your full backing until the moment you decide to remove them.

Another example of this is a shift in strategy.  Strategy drives execution – meaning the course you chart translates into the goals and activities of all the other people in your organization.  Mobilizing the troops is hard enough in the first place, and it requires a tremendous amount of leadership expressing commitment.  If you’re contemplating a shift in strategy, which of course happens a lot in dynamic businesses, and you share your thinking and qualms broadly, you risk paralyzing the organization or redirecting activities and goals without intending to or without even knowing it.

Some people might look at this concept and cry “foul – what about Transparency?”  I don’t buy that.  As I wrote recently in The Difference Between Culture and Values, “When you are 10 people in a room, Transparency means you as CEO may feel compelled to share that you’re thinking about pivoting the product, collect everyone’s point of view on the subject, and make a decision together. When you are 100 people, you probably wouldn’t want to share that thinking with ALL until it’s more baked, you have more of a concrete direction in mind, and you’ve stress tested it with a smaller group, or you risk sending people off in a bunch of different directions without intending to do so. When you are 1,000 employees and public, you might not make that announcement to ALL until it’s orchestrated with your earnings call, but there may be hundreds of employees who know by then. A commitment to Transparency doesn’t mean always sharing everything in your head with everyone the minute it appears as a protean thought.  At 10 people, you can tell everyone why you had to fire Pat – they probably all know, anyway.  At 100 people, that’s unkind to Pat.  At 1,000, it invites a lawsuit.”

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.

Brad wrote a fun post a couple years ago about rituals, including one about The Annual Dinner that he and Amy, Fred and Joanne Wilson, and Mariquita and I have been having not quite annually for almost 15 years now.  His most poignant comment (other than that apparently he and I are both getting larger and greyer in sync with each other) is about the power of marking the passage of time together with the same group of people.  We have a similar tradition at Return Path that’s worth noting in the context of my reboot program since it happened a few weeks ago and was part of the reboot cycle.

On the first anniversary of Return Path’s founding, I took my co-founder Jack Sinclair and our first two colleagues, Matt Spielman and Alexis Katzowitz, our to lunch where we shared lessons learned from the past year at the company and predictions for the company in the coming year with each other.  Jack, George Bilbrey, and I continued doing an end-of-year meal tradition with those two conversation topics for over a decade.  The last three years, since Jack left to join Stack Overflow, George and I have continued the tradition on our own.  Although some of our conversation every year isn’t really for public consumption, I’ve always regretted not blogging some highlights of it.  The tradition is a very powerful one of reflection and retrospective, which is deeply ingrained in Return Path’s culture, as a means of continuous improvement through renewal and refreshing.

Last month, we came up with a few good lessons learned that are featuring in my reboot.  Here they are:

• Growth covers up a lot of weaknesses.  While we still have a healthy growth rate as a company, it’s lower than is used to be – as is the case for all companies as they grow and face the law of large numbers.  What’s interesting, though, is how many weaknesses growth can cover up that start getting exposed as growth slows.  Think of it as an analogy to Technical Debt, call it Organizational Debt.  It’s the accumulation of small decisions over time to take an expedient path on a particular item.  It’s the “oh, we’ll throw a body at the problem now and automate the solution later” type thing that never gets automated, then gets compounded when the hired body needs to be replicated, then managed, then turned into a department.  You get the idea.
• Executive playbooks must be applied flexibly.  As is true of many growing companies, we’ve hired a number of outside senior executives over the last few years.  Some have worked out and others haven’t.  One thing we’ve learned, though, is that there’s a bit of a myth sometimes around the “I have the playbook” claim, the same way there’s a myth around hiring sales people who claim “I have a Rolodex” (or whatever the current version of that is).  Every company is unique, even in the same space.  Every situation is unique.  What makes an executive great is the ability to take learnings and experiences from prior roles and companies, both good and bad, and apply them thoughtfully to new situations, not the ability to run the same play over and over again in exactly the same way.  Sure, there are core business processes or systems that can be applied consistently, but most of those don’t require senior executive expertise.
• Know the job your customer is hiring you to do and what the alternatives are.  This is contemporary product management language, but it really rings true.  No matter who you are, no matter what job you do, you have a customer.  That customer is paying you something for a reason.  That money could go somewhere else.  Keeping that reason top of mind (and understanding when and why and how it shifts) is critical to developing the right solutions.

George, thanks for a decade and a half of reflections together (among other things!).

Reboot – The Fountainhead

Happy New Year!  Every few years or so, especially after a challenging stretch at work, I’ve needed to reboot myself.  This is one of those times, and I will try to write a handful of blog posts on different aspects of that.

The first one is about a great book.  I just read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead for (I think) the 5^th time.  It’s far and away my favorite book and has been extremely influential on my life.  I think of it (and any of my favorite books) as an old friend that I can turn to in order to help center myself when needed as an entrepreneur and as a human.  The last time I read it was over 10 years ago, which is too long to go without seeing one of your oldest friends, isn’t it?  While the characters in the book by definition are somewhat extreme, the book’s guiding principles are great.  I’ve always enjoyed this book far more than Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s more popular novel, which I think is too heavy-handed, and her much shorter works, Anthem and We The Living, which are both good but clearly not as evolved in her thinking.

As an entrepreneur, how does The Fountainhead influence me?  Here are a few examples.

• When I think about The Fountainhead, the first phrase that pops into my head is “the courage of your convictions.”  Well, there’s no such thing as being a successful entrepreneur without having the courage of your convictions.  If entrepreneurs took “no” for an answer the first 25 times they heard it, there would be no Apple, no Facebook, no Google, but there’d also be no Ford, no GE, and no AT&T
• One great line from the book is that “the essence of man is his creative capacity.”  Our whole culture at Return Path, and one that I’m intensely proud of, is founded on trust and transparency.  We believe that if we trust employees with their time and resources, and they know everything going on in the company, that they will unleash their immense creative capacity on the problems to be solved for the business and for customers
• Another central point of influence for me from the book is that while learning from others is important, conventional wisdom only gets you far in entrepreneurship.  A poignant moment in the book is when the main character, Howard Roark, responds to a question from another character along the lines of “What do you think of me?”  The response is “I don’t think of you.”  Leading a values-driven life, and running a values-driven existence, where the objective isn’t to pander to the opinion of others but to fill my life (and hopefully the company’s life) with things that make me/us happy and successful is more important to me than simply following conventional wisdom at every turn.  Simply put, we like to do our work, our way, noting that there are many basics where reinventing the wheel is just dumb
• Related, the book talks about the struggle between first-handers and second-handers.  “First-handers use their own minds.  They do not copy or obey, although they do learn from others.”  All innovators, inventors, and discoverers of new knowledge are first-handers.  Roark’s speech at the Cortland Homes trial is a pivotal moment in the book, when he says, “Throughout the centuries, there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision.  The great creators — the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors — stood alone against the men of their time.  Every great new thought was opposed.”  In other words, first-handers, critical thinkers, are responsible for human progress.  Second-handers abdicate the responsibility of independent judgment, allowing the thinking of others to dominate their lives.  They are not thinkers, they are not focused on reality, they cannot and do not build
• The “virtue of selfishness” is probably the essence of Rand’s philosophy.  And it sounds horrible.  Who likes to be around selfish people?  The definition of selfish is key, though.  It doesn’t inherently mean that one is self-centered or lacks empathy for others.  It just means one stays true to one’s values and purpose and potentially that one’s actions start with oneself.  I’d argue that selfishness on its own has nothing to do with whether someone is a good person or a good friend.  For example, most of us like to receive gifts.  But people give gifts for many different reasons – some people like to give gifts because they like to curry favor with others, other people like to give gifts because it makes them feel good.  That’s inherently selfish.  But it’s not a bad thing at all
• Finally, I’d say another area where The Fountainhead inspires me as a CEO is in making me want to be closer to the action.  Howard Roark isn’t an ivory tower designer of an architect.  He’s an architect who wants to create structures that suit their purpose, their location, and their materials.  He only achieves that purpose by having as much primary data on all three of those things as possible.  He has skills in many of the basic construction trades that are involved in the realization of his designs – that makes him a better designer.  Similarly, the more time I spend on the front lines of our business and closer to customers, the better job I can do steering the ship

One area where I struggle a little bit to reconcile the brilliance of The Fountainhead with the practice of running a company is around collaboration.  It’s one thing to talk about artistic design being the product of one man’s creativity, and that such creativity can’t come from collaboration or compromise.  It’s another thing to talk about that in the context of work that inherently requires many people working on the same thing at the same time in a generalized way.  Someday, I hope to really understand how to apply this point not to entrepreneurship, but to the collaborative work of a larger organization.  I know firsthand and have also read that many, many entrepreneurs have cited Ayn Rand as a major influence on them over the years, so I’m happy to have other entrepreneurs comment here and let me know how they think about this particular point.

It feels a little shallow to try to apply a brilliant 700 page book to my life’s work in 1,000 words.  But if I have to pick one small point to illustrate the connection at the end, it’s this.  I realize I haven’t blogged much of late, and part of my current reboot is that I want to start back on a steady diet of blogging weekly.  Why?  I get a lot out of writing blog posts, and I do them much more for myself than for those who reads them.  That’s a small example of the virtue of selfishness at work.

I’ve written a bunch on this blog and in Startup CEO, about Agile Development and the Lean Canvas and Lean Startups in general (see a really old post on Agile Development from 10 years ago when we first adopted it here, and one on Agile Marketing here).  The basic premise of all of this is that there is an old way to build software products and businesses, and a new lighter way loosely based on Toyota’s lean manufacturing principles.  The old way is HEAVY — you spec out a product and build it and hope you got it right; you write a big business plan and start raising money and executing on it and hope your assumptions are correct.  The new way is LIGHTER — you co-create product with customers and develop a Minimum Viable Product so that by the time it’s ready to sell, some customers are already buying it; you create a business plan that is all about systematically testing the underlying assumptions first, then raising money and charging forward after you know what you’re dealing with.

As readers of this blog know, Return Path is a software/services company that cares about building a robust business, and we also have a lot of passion around building our organization and culture.  We’ve always been fairly progressive with our People practices and programs, and we’re also always trying to innovate to make those things more impactful, easier, and more fun.  And that brings us to the subject of this post.

Over the last 2 years, we have been working to make teams more effective (creatively, we called this work “Effective Teams”); we loosely used Patrick Lencioni’s 5 Dysfunctions of a Team as the framing for the work we do with teams.  We ensure they develop strong, trusting relationships, have the skills and courage to have healthy conflict, which means they can commit to the decisions they make; they then hold each other accountable and ultimately get better results.   In addition to regular team development activities, our teams now give each other regular feedback including team-based peer-to-peer feedback through a facilitated quarterly session.   We saw improvements in team development which were verified by an increase of 13% of positive results in team effectiveness surveys.

We are now working to ensure that teams are working in a more agile way, and that their stakeholders are involved in the creation and evaluation of team goals.   Through our “Agile Everywhere” initiative, our Effective Teams work is expanding to help teams develop more agile operating systems.  By June 30, teams will be using some of the agile methodologies to:

break work down into smaller pieces

check in frequently on progress

share feedback among team members and stakeholders

tune practices based on feedback

report results publicly and

establish a predictable operating system.

As with most of our People practices, we modeled this on the Executive Committee, and we’ve instituted  things like Daily Stand-ups and Trello Boards for a pretty disparate set of teams.  We’ve found some practices useful, and we’ve adapted some practices to meet our needs.  We are now in process of piloting these practices with 15 teams throughout the company.  Stay tuned!

Unknown Unknowns

As Return Path gets older, we are having more and more alums go on to be successful senior executives at other companies – some in our space, some not.  It’s a great thing, and something I’m really proud of.  I was wondering the other day if there’s effectively some kind of “RP Playbook” that these people have taken with them.  Here’s what I learned from asking five of them.

People-related practices are all prominent as part of the Playbook, not surprising for a People First company.  Our Peer Recognition program, which is almost as old as the company and has evolved over time, was on almost everyone’s list.  Open Vacation is also part of the mix, as was a focus on getting Onboarding right so new employees start off on the right foot.  Live 360s were on multiple lists, too, as were Skip-Level 1:1s.

Beyond People-related programs, though, there was general agreement among the five that the mentality of trust in management was something they brought with them in this mythical Playbook.  Specific examples include fostering a culture of idea sharing, having difficult conversations, driving as much self-management as possible, focusing on managing high performers as opposed to spending all our cycles on managing low performers, balancing freedom and flexibility with performance and accountability, and going above and beyond and bending rules for sick employees and their families.

Connections and networking – both internal and external – made the cut as well.  A lot of those, especially external ones, are used to foster benchmarking, best practices sharing, and “leveling up” to help teams and organizations scale by learning from others.

Finally, there were some specific execution-related Playbook items from establishing a vision, to translating it into goals and fostering alignment across the organization, to instituting processes and systems instead of throwing bodies at problems.  One important element of execution cited is the importance of giving new and existing managers the tools to grow as the company grows.

This is hardly an exhaustive Playbook and unscientific in its construction, but I thought the “top of mind” answers from five senior people I respect was an interesting list and probably the beginning of something broader.

Thanks to the following friends for their contributions to this post:  Jack Sinclair, CFO of Stack Overflow; Angela Baldonero, SVP Human Resources for Kimpton Hotels; Tom Bartel, CEO of ThreatWave; Chad Malchow, CRO for Gitlab; and Dennis Malaspina, CRO for Parsley.