A Culture of Appreciation

As I mentioned in my last post in the Collaboration is Hard series, we’ve tried to create a culture of appreciation at Return Path that lowers barriers to collaboration and rewards mutual successes.  We developed a system that’s modeled somewhat after a couple of those short Ken Blanchard books, Whale Done and Gung Ho! It may seem a little hokey, and it doesn’t work 100% of the time, but in general, it’s a great way to make it easy for people to say a public “thanks” to a colleague for a job well done.

The idea is simple.  We have an “award request” form on our company Intranet that any employee can use to request one of five awards for one or more of their colleagues, and the list evolves over time.  The awards are:

ABCD – for going Above and Beyond the Call of Duty

Double E – for “everyday excellence”

Crowbar – for helping someone in sales “pry our way in” to a new customer

Damn, I Wish I’d Thought of That – for coming up with a great insight for the business (credit for the name of course goes to our former colleague Andy Sernovitz)

WOOT – for Working Out Of Title and helping a colleague

Our HR coordinator Lisa does a quick review of award submissions to make sure they are true to their definitions and make sure that people aren’t abusing the system, and the awards are announced and posted on the home page of the Intranet every week and via RSS feed in near-real time.

Each award carries a token monetary value of $25-$200 paid with American Express gift checks, which are basically like cash.  We send out the checks with mini-statements to employees every quarter.

It’s not a perfect system.  The biggest shortcoming is that it’s not used evenly by different people or different groups.  But it’s the best thing we’ve come up with so far to allow everyone in the company to give a colleague a virtual pat on the back, which encourages great teamwork!

Collaboration is Hard, Part III

In Part I, I talked about what collaboration is:

partnering with a colleague (either inside or outside of the company) on a project, and through the partnering, sharing knowledge that produces a better outcome than either party could produce on his or her own

and why it’s so important

knowledge sharing as competitive advantage, interdependency as a prerequisite to quality, and gaining productivity through leverage

In Part II, I suggested a few reasons why collaboration is difficult for most of us

It doesn’t come naturally to us on a cultural level, it’s hard to make an up-front investment of time in learning when you don’t know what you’re going to learn, and there’s a logistical hurdle in setting up the time and framework to collaborate

So now comes the management challenge — if collaboration is so important and yet so hard, how do we as CEOs foster collaboration in our organizations?  Not to say we have the formula down perfect at Return Path — if we did, collaboration wouldn’t show up as a development item for so many people at reviews each year — but here are five things we have done, either in small scale or large scale, to further the goal (in no particular order):

1. We celebrate collaboration.  We have a robust system of peer awards that call out collaboration in different ways.  I will write about this in longer form sometime, but basically we allow anyone in the company to give anyone else in the company one of several awards (all of which carry a cash value) at any time, for any reason.  And we post the awards on the Intranet and via RSS feed so everyone can see who is being appreciated for what reason.  This tries to lower the cultural barriers discussed in the last post.
2. We share our goals with each other.  This happens on two levels, and it’s progressed as the company has gotten more mature.  On a most basic level, we are very public about posting our goals to the whole company, at least at the department level (soon to be at the individual level), so everyone can see what everyone else is working on and note where they can contribute.  But that’s only half the battle.  We also have increasingly been developing shared goals — they show up on your list and on my list — so that we are mutually accountable for completing the project.
3. We set ourselves up for regular collaborative communication.  Many of our teams and departments use the Agile framework for work planning and workflow management, including the daily stand-up meeting as well as other regularly scheduled communication points (see other posts I’ve written about Agile Development and Agile Marketing).  Agile takes out a lot of the friction caused by logistical hurdles in collaborating with each other.
4. We provide financial incentives for collaboration.  In general, we run a three-tiered incentive comp program.  Most people’s quarterly or annual bonuses are 1/3 tied to individual goals achievement (which could involve shared goals with others), 1/3 tied to division revenue goals (fostering collaboration within each business unit), and 1/3 tied to company financial performance (fostering at least some level of collaboration with others outside your unit).  This helps, although on its own certainly isn’t enough.
5. We provide collaboration tools.  Finally, we have had developed reasonably good series of internal tools — Wiki, Intranet, RSS feeds — over the years, all of which are about to be radically upgraded, to encourage and systematize knowledge sharing.  This allows for a certain amount of "auto collaboration" but hopefully also allows people to realize how much there is to be gained by partnering with other subject matter experts within the company when projects call for it, alleviating in part the "you don’t know what you don’t know" problem.

So that’s where we are on this important topic.  And I’m only finding that it gets more important as the company gets bigger.  What are your best practices around fostering collaboration?

Collaboration is Hard, Part I

Every year when we do 360 reviews, a whole bunch of people at all levels in the organization have “collaboration” identified as a development item.  I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic lately and will do a two-part post on this.  So, first things first…what is collaboration and why is it so important?

Let’s start with the definition of collaboration from our friends at Wikipedia:

Collaboration is a process defined by the recursive interaction of knowledge and mutual learning between two or more people who are working together, in an intellectual endeavor, toward a common goal which is typically creative in nature. Collaboration does not necessarily require leadership and can even bring better results through decentralization and egalitarianism.

What does that mean in a business setting?  It means partnering with a colleague (either inside or outside of the company) on a project, and through the partnering, sharing knowledge that produces a better outcome than either party could produce on his or her own.  Interestingly, the last sentence of the definition implies that collaboration can happen across levels in an organization but is generally more effective when the parties who are collaborating are on somewhat equal footing.

Why is collaboration important?  There are probably a zillion reasons.  Let me take a stab at what I think are three important ones:

1. It’s not about hard assets any more. In a knowledge economy/company, sharing information and learnings is critical.  And that’s what’s at the heart of the collaborative process.  Each person in the organization does a different job; even those who are in the same role have different experiences with their role and different interactions both internally and externally as a result.  A collaborative process that by definition involves learning drives the organization forward and to a better place.  An example…if you have a deep working knowledge of your product, and your counterpart in marketing has a deep working knowledge of public relations, collaborating on a PR strategy to launch the product’s latest feature means that you will learn more about public relations and your colleague will learn more about your product.  In the end, you both get smarter, and the collective intellect of your organization grows — so your company gains incremental advantage over the competition as a result.
2. No man is an island. Most functions and business units are in some way interdependent.  Think back to the example of product and PR above.  Both parties learn through collaboration and make things better for the future.  Here’s the rub, though — the collaboration in that example is the only way to produce the right outcome.  So the prior point illustrates offense, but this one illustrates defense.  Failure to collaborate in this simple case would lead to a misguided PR launch strategy for the new product feature.  Either product would dictate the release strategy and text — missing some important subtleties about what reporters will/won’t pick up or without thinking through how different constituencies will react to the messaging — or PR would dictate the release strategy and timing — missing important but subtle points of competitive differentiation in the product features or botching a market-specific window for the announcement.
3. Leverage is king. If the first point illustrates offense (collaboration moves the organization forward) and the second one illustrates defense (failure to collaborate suboptimizes the quality of results), this one illustrates productivity (perhaps a subset of offense).  Collaboration gives leverage, which in turn gives productivity.   Let’s not pick on our poor product and PR people this time, though.  Let’s think about one of the most difficult things to do, which is to hire good people.  As I wrote a few years ago in The Hiring Challenge, the three things to do when hiring (which are all hard) are defining the job properly, finding the time to do it right, and remembering that the process doesn’t stop on the person’s first day on the job.  So where does collaboration come in?  Once your company is big enough to have a good HR person or team, the collaborative approach to having them help you with recruiting is the best option.  Sure, you can “throw it over the wall” to HR — give them a job title and location and comp range and see what happens.  And you will get some candidates, some of which might be ok.  Or you can forget about HR and try to do it yourself and not have time to get it right.  Or you can collaborate, bring HR into the discussion about the need for the position, the skills required, and the fit with your organization, even write a job description with HR and discuss which companies or types of companies you want to see on candidates’ resumes — and voila!  HR can go off and do 10x the work at 10x the quality.  For a little more up-front effort than the “throw it over the wall” approach, you leveraged yourself tremendously through what can be a very time consuming process.

Although my examples are by nature from my own industry for the past 12+ years, it’s hard to think of too many organizations or industries where collaboration isn’t critical to success.  Even in companies like investment banks or strategy consulting firms, which traditionally are very hierarchical, command-and-control organizations filled with brilliant individual contributors, the most successful companies (think Goldman Sachs, McKinsey) are the ones that seem to foster more collaboration than others in the development of their people and the development of shared intellectual capital that helps drive the organization forward and ahead of its competition.

In Part II, I’ll answer the title question here…why is collaboration hard?  Stay tuned!

Book Short: Stick Figures That Matter

I have read a bunch of books lately to try to improve my presentation skills. The latest one, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, by Dan Roam, was good, and quite different from some of the others I’ve read recently like Presentation Zen and Beyond Bullet Points, both of which are much more focused on effective use of Powerpoint.

The Back of the Napkin takes a different approach. The focus is much more on creating compelling visuals. It’s not about Powerpoint so much as it is about teaching how to crystallize concepts into tight and compelling schematics. Roam creates two pretty good frameworks for thinking about this: one that breaks down the message of a given slide into its most simple element — are you describing a who (use a portrait), what (chart), when (timeline), where (map), why (plot), or how (flowchart)? And a second that takes that element and asks five questions about the best way to convey the information — simple vs. elaborate, quality vs. quantity, vision vs. execution, individual vs. comparison, or change state vs. as-is.

Both frameworks are good, and if you’re already doing really good presentations, this will help improve them. In short, I’d say The Back of the Napkin is a good read if you’re obsessed with creating compelling visuals, but it’s more of a deeper drill than the two books I noted above. I’d read and master the material from Presentation Zen for 101, then dive into this topic for the 201 course.

Book Short:  Catchiest Title in a Long Time

You have to admit, a book called The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich has a pretty enticing title.  The email geek in me thinks that if it were a subject line, it would have a good open rate.  Anyway, the book, by Timothy Ferriss, is a breezy read that  blends self help with entrepreneurship, has a lot of good resource lists in it, and is worth reading  if you don’t take it too  seriously.

There are some good central points to the book.  First, life has changed, and people don’t want to slave away until they’re 65 any more so they can do all the fun stuff in their old age — they want to change directions, unplug more regularly, and enjoy life with their families when they’re younger.  I buy that.
Second, good companies are increasingly allowing employees more degrees of freedom in the where and when and even how of getting things done, just as long as they get things done — and people should take advantage of that.  I buy that as well — we practice that at Return Path, generally speaking.  Third, startups that are mainly virtual organizations and internet-based are easier, cheaper, and potentially more profitable than most businesses have been, historically speaking.  Ok, fair enough.

Fourth, anyone can be just like the author and do all of this stuff, too, right?  Start a business that turns into a cash machine that requires little to no maintenance while becoming one of the best tango dancers in the world in South America, etc. etc. etc.  Well, maybe not.  I guess the point of self-help books is to show an extreme example and inspire people to achieve it, and I do think there’s a lot to what Ferriss says about how people can live richly without being rich, but the fact is that the world would fall apart if everyone did what he does.  And the other fact is that Ferriss is well above average in intellect and drive, and probably some physical talents as well from his descriptions of tango dancing and kick boxing, which must contribute to his success in life far more than his operating philosophy does.

But as I said, it’s a fun read, and if you don’t take it too seriously, or at least take the feedback directionally as opposed to whole hog, it’s well worth it.

Book Short:  Shamu-rific

I re-read an old favorite last night in preparation for a management training course I’m co-teaching today at Return Path:  Ken Blanchard’s Whale Done! The Power of Positive Relationships.  I was reminded why it’s an old favorite.  It has a single concept which is simple but powerful.  And yes, it’s based loosely on killer whale  training tactics.

Accentuate the positive.

The best example in the book is actually a personal one more than a professional one.  The main character of the book has a “problem” in that he chronically works late, then comes home and gets beat up by his wife about coming home so late.  The result?  No behavior change — and probably even a reinforcement of the behavior because, after all, who wants to come home and get beat up?  The change as a result of the new philosophy?  The wife thanks her husband when he does come home at a more reasonable hour, makes him a nice dinner, etc. which makes the husband WANT to come home earlier.

That’s probably a poor paraphrasing of the story, and as I’m typing the story out here, boy does it sound a bit 1950s in terms of its portrayal of gender role stereotypes.  Nonetheless, I think it makes the point well.

Try it out sometime at work (or at home).  Pick a behavior you want to see more of out of a direct report, especially one that’s linked to another behavior you don’t like.  Accentuate the positive.  Make the person WANT to do more of it.  And watch the results!

Book Short:  Loving the Strengths Movement More Than the Book

I’m a big believer in the so-called Strengths Movement — that we would all be better served by playing to our strengths than agonizing over fixing our weaknesses. I think it’s true both in professional and personal settings.

The books written by Marcus Buckingham that come out of Gallup’s extensive research into corporate America, First, Break All the Rules (about management) and Now, Discover Your Strengths (self-management) are both quite good.  Another book written by someone else off the same research corpus, 12: The Elements of Great Managing is ok, but not as good, as I wrote about here.

Buckingham’s newest, Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance, is fine and has some good points but is way too long, a little hokey, and has a lot of online companion material that is far more interesting sounding than it is actually useful.

The book does build nicely on Now, Discover Your Strengths by giving you inspiration and a framework for taking those signature themes from the prior book and translating them into action — stuff you actually do every day that plays to your strengths and draws out your weaknesses.  And that’s helpful.  Some of his suggestions for what you do with that information are ok but a bit common sense only and way too drawn out (“here’s how to talk to your boss…”).

To be fair, I am going to do some of the work that Buckingham recommended doing — so I guess that says something about the power of the book, or at least the movement underlying it.  But not the best read in the world.

Not Dead Yet

Ah Spring.  Flowers bloom.  Love is in the air.  And it’s time for the annual round of “email is dead” articles and blog posts.  With apologies to Monty Python, and on the heels of last week’s fracas about social networking having more users than email, once again I say, email is Not Dead Yet!

Three articles of late are pretty interesting and point out that the trends in online channel usage are far murkier than meets the eye.

First, Sherry Chiger’s story in Direct that One in Five Merchants Shuns Marketing Email has a poor headline for an interesting, data-rich article.  The article should be about how “Four in Five” adopt.  The article has links to a bunch of interesting in-depth reports you can download, but some of the eye-catching stats include the fact that more B2C companies use email than their own web site for marketing (96% vs. 90%); that the #1 use of “if I had more money in my marketing budget, it would go to” is “creating more sophisticated email”; and that email is the “most valuable online strategy,” beating out SEO and materially ahead of Social Media, SEM, sending offline traffic online, affiliate, display, and abandoned shopping cart marketing.

Sherry’s follow up article entitled E-mail and Social Media: The New Chocolate and Peanut Butter

 and Liana Evans’ article in ClickZ, Email Can Be Social Media’s Best Friend, both explain the interplay of email and social media nicely.  You can’t, or at least shouldn’t, have one without the other.  This matches our experience at Return Path, where a number of our largest clients are the biggest social networks.  We always say that “social networking runs on email.”  Look at your inbox sometime and see how many messages are from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., which prompt you to create page views for them, um, I mean, visit their sites.

And of course the recent Morgan Stanley data is somewhat problematic (chart published here among other places).  First, I’m not sure where their base data came from, but I’ve never seen an estimate of worldwide email users that’s only 850MM.  The Morgan Stanley report says there are 1.8B people online worldwide, and there are been stats consistently published over the years that between 80-95% of people online use email.  This report from Radicati has the number of email users worldwide growing from 1.4B last year to 1.9B over the next few years. That sounds more like it.  

There’s no question that people spend more time in social networks and will continue to. They’re more multi-faceted. But that “error” in reporting on number of email addresses pretty dramatically changes the two charts. Plus, don’t you have to have an email account to sign up for most social networks?  And as my colleague Ezra Fischer noted, how the counting works in these two charts is important. For example, I have 2-3 email accounts, but I have 10-12 social network accounts. Am I counted once in each category, or 2-3 in the first and 10-12 in the second? Or worse, once in the first and 10-12 times in the second?

Anyway, every time I write one of these “in defense of email” posts, I get criticized for having too vested an interest in the subject matter to be objective.  If that’s the case, so be it – but who else is going to highlight the positive counterpoints when the buzz is all pointed to the demise of email?

Book Short: Not About Going With The…

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (book, Kindle), was a great read and a nice change from either strictly business books or my regular fiction/non-fiction reading. It’s basically about the process of achieving happiness through control over one’s inner life, but it’s far from a self-help book. It’s almost more of practical psychology deep dive into what brings about happiness and peak performance – a state the author calls Flow but others have called other things over time, like being “in the zone.”

The author talks about achieving this control as synonymous with the enviable ability to persevere despite obstacles and setbacks and transform hopeless situations into challenges to be overcome, just through the force of personality. This ability comes directly from ways to order consciousness so as to be in control of feelings and thoughts. The normal entropy/chaos of the mind is the enemy. There were a few key moments or takeaways in the book for me.

1. When one’s experience is most positive – when one is achieving Flow – people cite the following conditions in this order of importance:

– Confront tasks we have a chance of completing

– Able to concentrate

– Concentration is possible because the task has clear goals and…

– …provides immediate feedback

– Act with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life

– Exercise a sense of control over actions

– Concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the experience is over

2. Becoming more Autotelic – learning how to make experiences ends in and of themselves – coming from the Greek words for “self” and “goal,” this concept is savoring a given activity for its own sake, NOT for its consequences and is a key to achieving Flow. Whether you create a mental construct around beating a personal record, doing math or pattern matching in your head, or something else, being able to focus enough energy on the task at hand and not be distracted by the world around (present or future) is key. It’s a little like what I wrote a few months ago about how achieving mental discipline in the small areas of one’s life can lead to much greater things by building confidence and clearing mental clutter.

3. The concept of the “Flow channel” – as skill increases, challenges must also increase proportionally in order for us to continue learning, growing, and excelling – and achieving Flow.

4. Transformational coping is the ability to cheat chaos – transforming a hopeless situation into a new flow activity that can be controlled and enjoyed and emerge stronger from…

– Unselfconscious self-assurance – ego absent but confident, not at odds with environment but part of it

– Focusing attention on the world – looking outward, not inward

– The discovery of new solutions – being able to perceive unexpected opportunities as a result

5. How to develop the autotelic self

– Set clear goals

– Become immersed in the activity

– Pay attention to what’s happening

– Learn to enjoy immediate experience

The book reminded me of a couple other things I’ve read, in case any of these resonate with you. First, Tim Gallwey’s “Inner Game” books where he talks about “relaxed concentration,” basically the Flow state, and the inner conflict between focus on the event and focus on the consequences, between mental chaos and mental discipline, personified as Self 1 and Self 2. If you haven’t read these, any are good and give you the general idea, depending on which piques your interest the most: The Inner Game of Golf (book, Kindle), The Inner Game of Tennis (book only), and The Inner Game of Work (book, Kindle). Second, David Allen’s Getting Things Done theory about how a clear, uncluttered mind can do its best work. As Flow says, achieving an ordered mental condition is difficult – unless a person knows how to give order to his or her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment.

I’m not sure this book short does the book justice. It’s pretty complex and is rich with examples, but Flow (book, Kindle) is well worth a read if you’re into the theory of self control leading to better results and more happiness in life. Thanks to my friend Jonathan Shapiro for this book.

The Gift of Feedback, Part III

Last week, I posted about my new development plan.  I thought I’d also share a “team development plan” that we crafted this year for the entire Executive Committee at Return Path (basically me and my direct reports), coming out of all of our 360 live reviews taken as a whole.

1.  Push each other harder and be continuous in our effort to provide the team and each of us feedback and further develop:  Improve ability to handle conflict as a group; Drive this work deeper into the organization; “Eyes/ears/mouth open;”  Explore how to better serve as role models to the rest of the organization, especially our direct reports/the next level of management; How do we get the Level II to function in the way that we do?
2. Getting messaging out/improve our communications as a team to the rest of the organization
3. Be more hawkish with underperformers:  Exert a discipline in dealing with problems; Making tough calls that don’t feel very good; Do we accept mediocrity?
4. Take responsibility for everyone as a group
5. Do we have a team of A+ players?  How do we recruit them as we get bigger?  Can we attract the best?  Or pay differently?  Revisit incentive comp plan if we don’t feel like it’s working as intended?
6. At least 2x/year comprehensively evaluate next level management to assess bench strength
7. Goal: to have this executive team be the outlier and be able to grow and each and as a team be able to manage a $100MM company

Thanks to our friend Marc Maltz at Triad Consulting as always for facilitating these great sessions and distilling the learnings down into bite-sized pieces for us!