I was talking to a CEO the other day who believed it was “wrong” (literally, his word) to meet directly 1:1 with people in the organization who did not report to him.  I’ve heard from other CEOs in the past that they’re casual or informal or sporadic about this practice, but I’ve never heard someone articulate before that they actively stayed away from it.  The CEO in question’s feeling was that these meetings, which I call Skip-Level Meetings, disempowers managers.

I couldn’t disagree more.  I have found Skip-Level Meetings to be an indispensable part of my management and leadership routine and have done them for years.  If your culture is set up such that you as CEO can’t interact directly and regularly with people in your organization other than the 5-8 people who report to you, you are missing out on great opportunities to learn from and have an impact on those around you.

That said, there is an art to doing these meetings right, in ways that don’t disempower people or encourage chaos.  Some of these themes will echo other things I’ve written in recent posts like Moments of Truth and Scaling Me.  My five rules for doing Skip-Level Meetings are:

1. Make them predictable.  Have them on a regular schedule, whatever that is.  The schedule doesn’t have to be uniform across all these meetings.  I have some Skip-Levels that I do monthly, some quarterly, some once a year, some “whenever I am in town.”
   
2. Use a consistent format.  I always have a few questions I ask people in these meetings – things about their key initiatives, their people, their roadblocks, what I can do to help, what their POV is about the company direction and performance, how they are feeling about their role and growth.  I also expect that people will come with questions or topics for me.  If I have more meaty ad hoc topics, I’ll let the person know ahead of time.
   
3. Vary the location.  When I have regular Skip-Levels with a given person, I try to do the occasional one over a meal or drink to make it a little more social.  For remote check-ins, I now always do Skype or Videophone.
   
4. Do groups.  Sometimes group skip-levels are fun and really enlightening, either with a full team, or with a cross-section of skip-levels from other teams.  Watching people relate to each other gives you a really different view into team dynamics.
   
5. Close the loop.  I almost always check-in with the person’s manager BEFORE AND AFTER a Skip-Level.  Before, I ask what the issues are, if there is anything I should push on or ask.  After, I report back on the meeting, especially if there are things the person and I discussed that are out of scope for the person’s job or goals, so there are no surprises.

 I’m sure there are other things I do as well, but I can’t imagine running the company without this practice.  Doing it often and well EMPOWERS people in the company…I’d argue that managers who feel disempowered by it aren’t managers you necessarily want in your business unless you really run a command-and-control shop.

What Gets Said vs. What Gets Heard

I’ve been on the edge of a few different situations lately at work where what seems like a very clear (even by objective standards) conversation ends up with two very different understandings down the road.  This is the problem I’d characterize as “What gets said isn’t necessarily what gets heard.”  More often than not, this is around delivering bad news, but there are other use cases as well.  Imagine these three fictitious examples:

• Edward was surprised he got fired, even though his manager said he gave him repeated warnings and performance feedback
• Jacob thought his assignment was to write a proposal and get it out the door before a deadline, but his manager thought the assignment was to schedule a brainstorming meeting with all internal stakeholders to get everyone on the same page before finalizing the proposal
• Bella gets an interim promotion – she still needs to prove herself for 90 days in the new job before the promotion is permanent and there is a comp adjustment – then gets upset when the “email to all” mentions that she is “acting”

Why does this happen?  There are probably two main causes, each with a solution or two.  The first is that What Gets Said isn’t 100% crystal clear.  Delivering difficult news is hard and not for the squeamish.  What can be done about it?  The first problem — the crystal clear one — can be fixed by brute force.  If you are giving someone their last warning before firing him, don’t mumble something about “not great performance” and “consequences.”  Look him in the eye and say “If you do not do x, y, and z in the next 30 days, you will be fired.” 

The second cause is that, even if the conversation is objectively clear, the person on the receiving end of the conversation may WANT to hear something else or believes something else, so that’s what “sticks” out of the conversation.  Solving this problem is more challenging.  Approaching it with a lengthy conversation process like the Action Design model or the Difficult Conversations model is one way; but we don’t always have the time to prepare for or engage in that level of conversation, and it’s not always appropriate.  I’d offer two shortcut tips to get around this issue.  First, ask the person to whom you’re speaking to “play back in your own words what you just heard.”  See it she gets it right.  Second, send a very clear follow-up email after the conversation recapping it and asking for email confirmation.

People are only human (for the most part, in my experience), and even when delivering good news or assignments, sometimes things get lost in translation.  But clarity of message, boldness of approach, and forcing playback and confirmation are a few ways to close the gap between What Gets Said and What Gets Heard.

Email Marketing Good and Bad:  Case Study Snippets

I had a good meeting this morning with one of our long-time multi-channel retailer clients who is in town for Shop.org’s Annual Summit.  Over the course of our conversation, she relayed two things going on in her world of email marketing at the moment that bear repeating (with her permission, of course).

First, the good.  In a recent study, our retailer hero determined that customers who receive their email newsletters and offers (not even open/click, just receive) spend on average 3x as much on in-store purchases than their non-email counterparts in any given week or for any given campaign.  Talk about deriving non-email or non-click value from your email marketing efforts!

Second, the bad (ok, well, it’s the ugly as well).  Our retailer hero was just nailed by Spamhaus because someone out there complained about a transactional email he or she received from the retailer.  She estimates that the poor Spamhaus listing is costing her millions of dollars a year in lost sales from regular customers.  The email was literally about a refund that the retailer owed the customer (why there was a complaint — who knows?).  What did Spamhaus suggest the retailer do?  Repermission their list around transactional messages — “or else.”  Seems to me that that’s a pretty tough stance to take on rather shaky evidence and with no appropriate dispute resolution mechanism (e.g., one that’s not just tuned to mailers’ interests, but one that’s fair in the broadest sense of the word).  No wonder Spamhaus is being sued, and no wonder the vigilante blacklist providers of the world are losing traction with ISPs and corporate system administrators.  Authentication and real, professionally run reputation systems with ample amounts of representative data, feedback loops, and dispute resolution mechanisms will ultimately win the day over the vigilantes of the world.  Folks like Spamhaus can get things right lots of the time and in fact do provide a valuable cog in the global world of spam fighting, but they’re less great at making amends when they don’t.

So email continues to have its challenges around filtering and deliverability…but how cool is it that marketers are really sinking their teeth into metrics that prove how effective the email channel is for driving sales, both online and offline?

Closure

This past weekend was a weekend of closure for me. As I prepare to leave the city after almost 17 years and the apartment I’ve lived in for almost 15, we had my two original roommates from this apartment in town for the weekend with their families for a bit of a farewell party. Times certainly have changed – from three single guys to three families and 7, almost 8 kids between us. Sitting around and noting that all three couples had either gotten engaged or first started dating within the confines of Apartment 35B, then saying goodbye as everyone left the apartment for the last time, was a little surreal. But overall, having everyone around was great fun and was a fitting way to mark the occasion.

If that wasn’t enough to drive the point home, we were lucky enough to get tickets to the Yankees game last night, which was the last home game the Yanks will play in their 85-year old stadium before moving across the street next season to their fancy new home. The ceremony before the game, which featured a bunch of prominent Yankee greats and their progeny (Babe Ruth’s daughter threw out the opening pitch!), was similarly surreal, but a fitting ending to a long-standing tradition.

Why is closure important? I’m not a psychologist, but for me and my brain anyway, celebrating or formally noting the END of something helps move on to the BEGINNING of the next thing. It helps compartmentalize and define an experience. It provides time to reflect on a change and WHY it’s (inevitably) both good and bad. And I suppose it appeals to the sentimentalist in me.

I think it’s important to create these moments in business as well as in one’s personal life. We and I have done them sporadically at Return Path over the years. Moving offices as we expand. Post-mortems on projects gone well or badly. Retrospectives with employees who didn’t work out, sometimes months after the fact. Whether the moment is an event, a speech at an all-hands meeting, or even just an email to ALL, one of the main jobs of a leader in building and driving a corporate culture is to identify them and mark them.

Half Your Waking Hours

I just came back from our annual Board/Management ski trip (and Board meeting) — we had about half of both groups join, which is typical given the time commitment.  We had a great time, and the conversation for the three days was a nice blend of business and personal. 

The thing that struck me during the weekend — and I am reminded of this regularly in the office and at other work events as well — is how much I genuinely enjoy the company of the people with whom I work.  Whether it’s my senior staff, my Board, or anyone I can think of in other roles within Return Path, we can manage to have a good time together and have fun as well as be productively thinking about and discussing work.

With generic assumptions of 8 hours of sleep a night and 8 hours of work a day (neither one being true of course, but canceling each other somewhat out here), we spend half our waking hours on the job.  So we might as well choose to work with people that we get along with!  That doesn’t mean everyone we hire at Return Path has to be like-minded or have the same sense of humor.  But it does mean that we look for people who have that spark in their eye that says "I get it"; it means we want to find people who are articulate and have strong convictions and are not afraid to speak their mind; and it means we screen for people who can be light-hearted and don’t take themselves too too too seriously when we recruit, interview, and hire.

Think about that "half your waking hours" thing the next time you’re hiring someone.  Which candidate (of the technically qualified ones who are in the right zone in terms of compensation) would you rather spend your day with?  In my former career in management consulting, we used to call this the "Cleveland Airport test" — as in, if you were stuck in the Cleveland Airport with this candidate, would you be happy or sad about it?

Sometimes You Just Need a 2×4 Between the Eyes

Freshman year in college, fall semester, my friend Peggy and I were in a small seminar class together on Dante. We thought we were pretty smart before the class started. And that we were great writers. Lots of As in high school. Then we wrote our first paper. Professor Bob Hollander gave me a C-. I think Peggy got a D. We were devastated. And pissed. Sure, the ensuing cocktail took the edge off (this was college, after all), but we both scheduled time with the professor during his office hours to figure out where our carefully honed academic trains had gone off the tracks.

Essentially what he said to each of us was this (you have to picture the 60-something professor in a turtleneck smoking a pipe with gravely voice for full effect): “Matthew, your writing wasn’t the worst I’ve ever seen. But I feel like you can do better, and sometimes you just need a 2×4 between the eyes.” End of meeting. Thank you, sir, may I please have another?

I couldn’t have been more irritated. But I will tell you one thing. I worked four times as hard on my next paper, got an A-, and elevated my game permanently. Not just for this one class, but for all of them. Bob was right. His 2×4 between my eyes worked.

Sometimes when we deliver performance feedback in business, this approach makes sense. There are times when someone is really doing poorly and needs harsh (fair, but honest) feedback. There are also times when someone is doing so-so but generally just not living up to his or her promise and should be doing better. And in those cases, you have to just make a judgment call about whether to give feedback on the margin or go for the full 2×4 to drive the point home and get someone to really elevate his or her game for good.

Half Your Waking Hours

I just came back from our annual Board/Management ski trip (and Board meeting) — we had about half of both groups join, which is typical given the time commitment.  We had a great time, and the conversation for the three days was a nice blend of business and personal. 

The thing that struck me during the weekend — and I am reminded of this regularly in the office and at other work events as well — is how much I genuinely enjoy the company of the people with whom I work.  Whether it’s my senior staff, my Board, or anyone I can think of in other roles within Return Path, we can manage to have a good time together and have fun as well as be productively thinking about and discussing work.

With generic assumptions of 8 hours of sleep a night and 8 hours of work a day (neither one being true of course, but canceling each other somewhat out here), we spend half our waking hours on the job.  So we might as well choose to work with people that we get along with!  That doesn’t mean everyone we hire at Return Path has to be like-minded or have the same sense of humor.  But it does mean that we look for people who have that spark in their eye that says "I get it"; it means we want to find people who are articulate and have strong convictions and are not afraid to speak their mind; and it means we screen for people who can be light-hearted and don’t take themselves too too too seriously when we recruit, interview, and hire.

Think about that "half your waking hours" thing the next time you’re hiring someone.  Which candidate (of the technically qualified ones who are in the right zone in terms of compensation) would you rather spend your day with?  In my former career in management consulting, we used to call this the "Cleveland Airport test" — as in, if you were stuck in the Cleveland Airport with this candidate, would you be happy or sad about it?

I always thought that spam blacklists were well intentioned but problematic for the email ecosystem, since they are vigilantes in action and have no accountability and trackability. Periodically, I’ve even pondered whether or not they violate someone’s first amendment rights. It’s maddening to know you’re a good guy in the email world, you can get put on a blacklist because some anti-spam zealot decides he or she doesn’t like you on a whim, you can’t complain or get off of the list, you may not even know you’re on the list, then you’re downloaded thousands of times by naively trusting or equally zealous sysadmins, and boom — your emails aren’t getting through any more.

Then yesterday, I was looking at what’s probably the first blacklist for blog comment spam, dubbed by Brad Feld as BLAM. I immediately found myself using it myself to prevent my blog from getting overrun by the newest Internet evil. (Of course, I should be so lucky…my fledgling blog has all of one comment on it, but I’m sure there are scores of people ready to comment at a moment’s notice.)

So here we are at the dawn of a new era: the beginning of the blacklist for blam. I’m an early adopter of Jeff Nolan’s pioneering list and proud of it, which made me rethink my view of email blacklists for about five minutes. It didn’t ultimately change that view — email blacklists still have all the problems I mentioned above and have run amok — but it does make me hope that there’s a better long-term solution for stopping blam than the one the world of email has ended up with. Fred Wilson has some good thoughts on better tools for this as well.

Necessity, as always, is the mother of invention, but hopefully the blam blacklist situation won’t get out of control before someone tries to fix it, which may be too late. What I think we need now to solve the blacklist problem is a blacklist of blacklists, but that’s another story for another posting.

OnlyOnce Now MultiLingual

If you look in the left sidebar of OnlyOnce, you will now see a box that says “Translate This Page” with a dropdown that lets you pick the language.  Google Translate takes over from there and does the heavy lifting. 

Global world…awesome service.  Thanks, Google!

Thanks Brad and Ross for the tip.

Firsts, Still

After more than 13 years in the job, I run into “firsts” less and less often these days.  But in the past week, I’ve had three of them. They’re incredibly different, and it’s awkward to write about them in the same post, but the “firsts” theme holds them together.

One was incredibly tragic — one of our colleagues at Return Path died suddenly and unexpectedly.  Even though we’ve lost two other employees in the last 18 months to cancer, there was something different about this one.  While there’s no good way to die, the suddenness of Joel’s passing was a real shock to me and to the organization, and of course more importantly, to his wife.

The second was that I came face to face with a judge in the state of Delaware for the first time around some litigation we’re in the middle of now.  While I can’t comment on this for obvious reasons, you never think when you decide to incorporate in Delaware that a trip to a courthouse in Wilmington is in your future.

The third, which can only be described as bittersweet, is that we had our first long-time employee retire!  Now THAT’S something you never think about when you run a startup.  But Sophie Miller Audette, one of our first 20 employees going back to 2000 and the sixth longest tenured person at the company today, has decided to retire and move on to other adventures in her already rich life.  A quick search on my blog reveals that I’ve blogged about Sophie three times since I started OnlyOnce 9 years ago (as of next week).  The first time was in 2004 when I quoted her memorable line, “In my next life, I want to come back as a client.”  The second and third times were in 2005 and were about the company’s commitment to helping to find a cure for Multiple Sclerosis, which Sophie was diagnosed with almost 10 years ago now.  Sophie has been an inspiration to many of us for a long time, and while we’ll miss her day-to-day, she’ll always be part of the Return Path family.  Picture of her, me, and Anita at her “retirement dinner” earlier this week below.

I always say that one of the best parts about being in this job for this long is that there are always new challenges and new opportunities to learn and grow.  The last couple weeks, full of firsts, proved the point!

It’s a Sad Day When the Lawyers Take Over

With all due respect to lawyers, of course, Google’s recent decision to start making a legal fuss when people in the media use the word “Google” as a verb is NUTS.  Someone, get Marketing on Line 1 — and make it snappy.  Steve Rubel wrote about it, as did Jeff Jarvis, and the source material is here.

For the record, anyone who wants to use any of the following words or phrases as a verb, noun, or any other part of speech, may do so at any time:  Return Path, Sender Score, Authentic Response, Postmaster Direct.  Oh, and then there’s ECOA, the service we pioneered in 2000 that *is* occasionally (in some very small circles) used as a verb!