Holiday Cards c. 2007
Every year, I get a daily flood of business holiday cards on my desk in the second half of December. Some are nice and have notes from people with whom we do business – clients, vendors, partners, and the like. Some are kind of random, and it takes me a while to even figure out who they are from. Occasionally some even come in with no mark identifying from whence they came other than an illegible signature.
And every year, I receive one or two email cards instead of print & post cards, some apologetic about the medium. Until this year.
I think I’ve received about 10-15 cards by email this month. None with an apology. All with the same quality of art/creative as printed cards. It’s great! A good use of the email channel…much less cost…easier overhead for distribution…and of course better for the environment.
I wonder what made 2007 the tipping year for this.
Book Short: What’s Your Meeting Routine?
Patrick Lencioni’s Death by Meeting is, as Brad advertised, a great read, and much in line with his other books (running list at the end of the post). His books are just like candy. If only all business books were this short and easy to read.
This fable isn’t quite what I thought it was going to be at the outset – it’s not about too many meetings, which is what I’ve always called “death by meeting.” It’s about staff meetings that bore you to death. With a great story around them featuring characters named Casey and Will (my two oldest kids’ names, which had me chuckling the whole time), Lencioni describes a great framework for splitting up your staff meetings into four different types of meetings: the daily stand-up, the weekly tactical, the monthly strategic, and the quarterly offsite.
There’s definitely something to the framework. We have over the years done all four types of meetings, though we never had all four in our rotation at once as that felt like overkill. But I think at a minimum, any 2 get the job done much better than a single format recurring meeting. As long as you figure out how to separate status updates from more strategic conversations, you’re directionally in good shape. We have almost entirely eliminated or automated status update meetings at this point at my staff level.
The book has some other good stuff in it, though, about the role of conflict in staff meetings, which I’ll save for your own read of the book!
So far the series includes:
- The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (post, link)
- The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link
)
- The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link)
I have two more to go, which I’ll tackle in due course and am looking forward to.
Last week, I wrote about surrounding yourself with the best and brightest. Next in this series of posts is all about Creating an environment of trust. This is closely related to the blog post I wrote a while back in my series on Return Path’s Core Values on Transparency.  At the end of the day, transparency, authenticity, and caring create an environment of trust.
Some examples of that?
- Go over the real board slides after every board meeting – let everyone in the company know what was discussed (no matter how large you are, but of course within reason)
- Give bad news early and often internally. People will be less freaked out, and the rumor mill won’t take over
- Manage like a hawk – get rid of poor performers or cultural misfits early, even if it’s painful – you can never fire someone too soon
- Follow the rules yourself – for example, fly coach if that’s the policy, park in the back lot and not in a “reserved for the big cheese” space if you’re not in Manhattan, have a relatively modest office, constantly demonstrate that no task or chore is beneath you like filling the coke machine, changing the water bottle, cleaning up after a group lunch, packing a box, carrying something heavy
- When a team has to work a weekend , be there too (in person or virtually) – even if it’s just to show your appreciation
- When something really goes wrong, you need to take all the blame
- When something really goes right, you need to give all the credit away
Perhaps a bit more than the other posts in this series, this one needs to apply to all your senior managers, not just you. Your job? Manage everyone to these standards.
Startup CEO “Bibliography”
A couple people who read Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business asked me if I would publish a list of all the other business books I refer to over the course of the book. Here it is — I guess in some respects an all-time favorite list for me of business books.
And here’s the list of books in Brad Feld’s Startup Revolution series other than Startup CEO:
The Best Place to Work, Part 7: Create a Thankful Atmosphere
My final installment of this long series on Creating the best place to work (no hierarchy intended by the order) is about Creating a thankful atmosphere.
What does creating a thankful atmosphere get you? It gets you great work, in the form of people doing their all to get the job done. We humans – all of us, absolutely including CEOs – appreciate being recognized when they do good work. Honestly, I love what I do and would do it without any feedback, but nothing resonates with me more than a moment of thanks from someone on my exec team or my Board. Why should anyone else in the organization be any different?
This is not about giving everyone a nod in all-hands by doing shout-outs. That’s not sustainable as the company grows. And not everyone does great work every week or month! And it’s not about remembering to thank people in staff meetings, either, although that’s never bad and easier to contain and equalize.
It is about informal, regular pats on the back. To some extent inspired by the great Ken Blanchard book Whale Done, and as I’ve written about before here, it’s about enabling the organization to be thankful, and optimizing your own thankfulness.
Years ago we created a peer award system on our company Intranet/Wiki at Return Path. We enable Peer Recognition through this. As of late, with about 350 employees, we probably have 30-40 of these every week. They typically carry a $25 gift card award, although most employees tell me that they don’t care about the gift card as much as the public recognition. Anyone can nominate anyone for one of the following awards, which are unique to us and relevant to our culture:
- EE (Everyday Excellence) -is designed for us to recognize those who demonstrate excellence and pride in their daily work.
- ABCD (Above and Beyond the Call of Duty) -is designed for us to recognize the outstanding work of our colleagues who go Above and Beyond their duties and exemplify exactly what Return Path is about
- WOOT (Working Out Of Title) -is designed for us to recognize those who offer assistance that is not part of their job responsibilities.
- OTB (On The Business)-is about pulling ourselves out of day-to-day tasks and ensuring we are continually aligned with the long-term, strategic direction of the business. We make sure we’re not just optimizing our current tasks and processes but that we’re also thinking about whether or not we should even be doing those things. We stop to think outside of the “box” and about the interrelationship between what we are doing and everything else in the organization. In doing so, we connect the leaves, the branches, the trunk, the roots and soil of the tree to the hundreds of other trees in the forest. We step back to look at the big picture
- TLAO ( Think Like An Owner)-means that every one of us holds a piece of the Company’s future and is empowered to use good judgment and act on behalf of Return Path. In our day-to-day jobs we take personal responsibility for our products, services and interactions.  We spend like it’s our own money and we think ahead. We are trusted to handle situations like we own the business because we are smart people who do the right thing. We notice the things happening around us that aren’t in our day-to-day and take action as needed even if we’re not directly responsible
- Blue Light Special is designed for us to recognize anyone who comes up with a clever way to save the company money)
- Coy Joy Award is in memory of Jen Coy who was positive, optimistic and able to persevere through the most difficult of circumstances. This award is designed to recognize individuals who exemplify the RP values and spread joy through the workplace. This can be by going above and beyond to welcome new employees, by showing a high degree of care and consideration for another person at RP, by being a positive and uplifting influence, and/or making another person laugh-out-loud.
- Human Firewall is awarded if you catch a colleague taking extra care around security or privacy in some way, maybe a suggestion in a meeting, a feature in a product, a suggestion around policy or practice in the office.
In the early days, we read these out each week at All-Hands meetings. Today at our scale, we announce these awards each week on the Wiki and via email. And I and other leaders of the business regularly read the awards list to see who is doing what good work and needs to be separately thanked on top of the peer award.
Beyond institutionalizing thanks…in terms of you as an individual person, there are lots of ways to give thanks that are meaningful. Some are about maximizing Moments of Truth. Another thing I do from time to time is write handwritten thank you notes to people and mail them to their homes, not to work. But there are lots of ways to spend the time and mental energy to appreciate individuals in your company in ways that are genuine and will be noticed and appreciated. To some extent, this paragraph (maybe this whole post) could be labeled “It’s the little things.”
That’s it for this series…again, the final roundup for the full series of Creating the Best Place to Work is here and individual posts are here:
- Surround yourself with the best and brightest
- Create an environment of trust
- Manage yourself very, very well
- Be the consummate host
- Be the ultimate enabler
- Let people be people
- Create a thankful atmosphere
Anyone have any other techniques I should write about for Creating the Best Place to Work?
Book Short: Chip Off the Old Block
I have to admit, I was more than a little skeptical when Craig Spiezle handed me a copy of The Speed of Trust, by Stephen M. R. Covey, at the OTA summit last week. The author is the son of THE Stephen Covey, author of the world famous Seven Habits of Highly Effective People as well as The Eighth Habit (book, post). Would the book have substance and merit or be drafting off the dad’s good name?
I dog-ear pages of books as I read them, noting the pages that are most interesting if I ever want to go back and take a quick pass through the book to remind me about it (and yes, Ezra, I can do this on the Kindle as well via the bookmark feature). If dog-ear quantity is a mark of how impactful a book is, The Speed of Trust is towards the top of the list for me.
The book builds nicely on Seven Habits and The Eighth Habit and almost reads like the work of Stephen the father. The meat of the book is divided into two sections: one on developing what Covey calls “self trust,” a concept not unlike what I blogged about a few months ago, that if you make and keep commitments to yourself, you build a level of self-confidence and discipline that translates directly into better work and a better mental state. The other core section is one on building trust in relationships, where Covey lists out 13 behaviors that all lead to the development of trust.
In fact, we just had a medium-size trust breach a couple weeks ago with one of our key clients. Reading the book just as we are struggling to “right the wrong” was particularly impactful to me and gave me a number of good ideas for how to move past the issue without simply relying on self-flagellation and blunt apologies. This is a book full of practical applications.
It’s not a perfect book (no book is), and in particular its notion of societal trust through contribution is a bit weak relative to the rest of the book, but The Speed of Trust is an excellent read for anyone who wants to understand the fastest way to build — and destroy — a winning culture. It reads like a sequel of Covey senior’s books, but that’s a good thing.
Book Short:Â On The Same Page
Being on the same page with your team, or your whole company for that matter, is a key to success in business. The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, by Patrick Lencioni, espouses this notion and boils down the role of the CEO to four points:
- Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team
- Create organizational clarity
- Overcommunicate organizational clarity
- Reinforce organizational clarity through human systems
Those four points sound as boring as bread, but the book is anything but. The book’s style is easy and breezy — business fiction. One of the most poignant moments for me was when the book’s “other CEO” (the one that doesn’t “get it”) reflects that he “didn’t go into business to referee executive team meetings and delivery employee orientation…he loved strategy and competition.” Being a CEO is a dynamic job that changes tremendously as the organization grows. This book is a great handbook for anyone transitioning out of the startup phase, or for anyone managing a larger organization.
I haven’t read the author’s other books (this is one in a series), but I will soon!
The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business is Patrick Lencioni’s newest book. Unlike most or all of his other books (see the end of this post for the listing), this one is not a fable, although his writing style remains very quick and accessible.
I liked this book a lot. First, the beginning section is a bit of a recap of his Five Dysfunctions of a Team which I think was his best book. And the ending section is a recap of his Death by Meeting, another really good one. The middle sections of the book are just a great reminder of the basic building blocks of creating and communicating strategy and values – about driving alignment.
But the premise, as the subtitle indicates, is that maintaining organizational health is the most important thing you can do as a leader. I tell our team at Return Path all the time that our culture is a competitive advantage in many ways, some quantifiable, and others a little less tangible.
A telling point in the book is when Lencioni is relaying a conversation he had with the CEO of a client company who does run a healthy organization – he asked, “Why in the world don’t your competitors do any of this?” And the client responded, “You know, I honestly believe they think it’s beneath them.” Lencioni goes on to say, “In spite of its undeniable power, so many leaders struggle to embrace organizational health because they quietly believe they are too sophisticated, too busy, or too analytical to bother with it.” And there you have it. More examples of why “the soft stuff” is mission critical.
Lencioni’s “Recipe for Organizational Health” (the outline of the book):
–Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Build a Cohesive Leadership Team
–Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Create Clarity
–Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Overcommunicate Clarity
–Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Reinforce Clarity
And his recipe for creating a tight set of “mission/vision/values” (the middle of the book):
1. Why do we exist?
2. How do we behave?
3. What do we do?
4. How will we succeed?
5. What is most important, right now?
6. Who must do what?
While there are lots of other good frameworks for doing all of this, Lencioni’s models and books are great, simple reminders of one of the CEO’s most important leadership functions. We’re recrafting our own mission and values statements at the moment at Return Path, and we’re doing it using this 6-Question framework instead of the classic “Mission/Vision/Values” framework popularized a few years back by Harvard Business Review.
The full book series roundup as far as OnlyOnce has gotten so far is:
The Best Place to Work, Part 6: Let People Be People
Last week, in this continuing series on creating the best place to work, I talked about being a great enabler of people, meaning you do your best to let people do their best work. This week, I want to talk about Letting People Be People.
I wrote about topic a bit this last year when I wrote my series on Return Path’s Core Values, in particular the post on our value People Work to Live, Not Live to Work .
Work-life balance is critical. I’ve worked in a grind-it-out 100-hour/week environment as an analyst before. Quite frankly, it sucks. One week I actually filled in 121 on my hourly time sheet as a consultant.  If you’ve never calculated the denominator, it’s only 168. Even being well paid as a first-year analyst out of college, the hourly rate sucked. Thinking about 121 gives me the shivers today…and it certainly puts into perspective that whether you work 40, 45, 50, 55, or 60 hours in a given week can pale by comparison, and all still let you have a life. An average week of 40 hours probably doesn’t make sense for a high-growth company of relatively well-paid knowledge workers. But at 121 you barely get to shower and sleep.
While you may get a lot done working like a dog, you don’t get a lot more done hour for hour relative to productive people do in a 50-week environment. Certainly not 2x. People who say they thrive on that kind of pressure are simply lying – or to be fair, they’re not lying, but they are pretending they wouldn’t prefer a different environment, which is likely disingenuous and a result of rationalizing their time spent at work. Your productivity simply diminishes after some number of hours. So as a CEO, even a hard-charging one, I think it’s better to focus on creating a productive environment than an environment of sustained long hours.
Work has ebbs and flows just like life has ebbs and flows. As long as the work generally gets done well and when you need it, you have to assume that sometimes, people will work long hours in bursts and sometimes, people will work fewer hours. Work-life balance is not measured in days or even weeks, but over the long term. So to that end, We Let People Be People as a means of trading off freedom and flexibility for high levels of performance and accountability. At Return Path, we create an environment where people can be people by:
- Giving generous maternity leave and even paternity leave, at least relative to norms in the US
- Having a flexible “work from home” policy, as people do have personal things to do during the business day from time to time
- Allowing even more flexible work conditions for anyone (especially new parents) – 3 or 4 days/week if we can make it work
- Letting people take a 6-week paid sabbatical after 7 years, then after every 5 years after that
- Having an “open vacation” policy where people can take as much vacation as they want, as long as they get their jobs done
As with all the posts in this series, this is meant to be general, not specific. But these are a few of the things we’ve done to Let People Be People, which has created an incredibly productive environment here where people have fun, lead their lives, and still get their jobs done well and on time.
Book (Not So) Short:Â Raise Your Hand If You’re Sure
I couldn’t get the catchy jingle from the 80’s commercial for Sure deodorant (you remember, the one with the Statue of Liberty at the end of it – thanks, YouTube) out of my head while I was reading the relatively new book, Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End. Written by HBS professor Rosabeth Moss Kantor, Confidence is one of the few business books I’ve read that’s both long and worth reading in full.
The book has scores of examples of both winning and losing streaks, from sports, business, politics, and other walks of life, and it does a great job of breaking down the core elements that go into creating a winning streak or turnaround (Accountability, Collaboration, Innovation). Kantor also puts a very fine point on the “doom loop” of losing streaks and just how hard it is to turn them around. The book also has a good crisp definition of why winning streaks end — arrogange, anyone? — and has consistent, but not preachy recipes for avoiding pitfalls and driving success. All in all, very inspirational, even if many of the roots of success lie in well-documented leadership qualities like those expressed in Jim Collins’ Built to Last and Good to Great. The book is good enough that Kantor can even be forgiven for lauding Verizon, probably the most consistently awful customer service company I’ve ever dealt with.
But even more of the roots of success and disappointment around streaks are psychological, and these examples really rang true for me as I reflected back on our acquisition of the troubled NetCreations in 2004. That company was in the midst of a serious slump, a losing streak dating back to 2000, at the peak of the original Internet boom. Year over year, the company had lost revenues, profits, customers, and key personnel. Its parent company saw poor results and set it into the doom loop of starving it for resources and alternating between ignoring it and micromanaging it, and when we acquired the business, we found great assets and some fantastic people (many of whom I’m proud to say are still with us today), but a dispirited, blame-oriented, passive culture that was poised to continue wallowing in decline.
I can hardly claim that we’ve turned the business around in full, or that I personally made happen whatever turnaround there has been, but I do think we did a few things right as far as Kantor and Confidence would see it. Her formula for a turnaround (Espouse the new message, Exemplify it with leadership actions, Establish programs to systematically drive it home throughout the organization) is right in line with our philosophy here at Return Path.
First, we accelerated the separation and autonomy of a fledgeling NetCreations spin-off unit, now our Authentic Response market research group, and let a culture of collaboration and innovation flourish under an exceptionally talented leader, Jeff Mattes.
But that was the easy part (for me anyway), because that part of the business was actually working well, and we just let it do its thing, with more support from HQ. The turnaround of the core list rental and lead generation business of NetCreations, the original Postmaster Direct, was much tougher and is still a work in progress. In the last six months, we’ve finally turned the corner, but it hasn’t been easy. Even though we knew lots of what had to be done early on, actually doing it is much harder than b-school platitudes or even the best-written books make it seem.
The one thing that Kantor probably gives short shrift to, although she does mention it in passing a couple times, is that frequently turnarounds require massive major amounts of purging of personnel (not just management) to take hold. As one of my former colleagues from Mercer Management Consulting used to say, “sometimes the only way to effect Change Management is to change management.” Sometimes even very talented people are just bogged down with baggage — the “ghost of quarters past” — and nothing you do or say can break that psychological barrier.
Boy, have we learned that lesson here at Return Path the hard way. I’m extremely grateful to our team at Return Path, from the old RP people who’ve seen it all happen, to the old NetCreations people who are thriving in the new environment, to the new blood we’ve brought in to help effect the turnaround, for playing such important roles in our own Confidence-building exercises here. And I’m super Confident that 2007 will be the year that we officially turn the old NetCreations/Postmaster losing streak into a big, multi-year winning streak.
Anyway, I realize this may redefine the “short” in book short, but Confidence is without question a good general management and leadership read.
Book Short:Â Wither the Team
I keep expecting one of his books to be repetitive or boring, but Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team held my interest all the way through, as did his others. It builds nicely on the last one I read, Death by Meeting (post, link).
I’d say that over the 9 1/2 years we’ve been in business at Return Path, we’ve systematically improved the quality of our management team. Sometimes that’s because we’ve added or changed people, but mostly it’s because we’ve been deliberate about improving the way in which we work together. This particular book has a nice framework for spotting troubles on a team, and it both reassured me that we have done a nice job stamping out at least three of the dysfunctions in the model and fired me up that we still have some work to do to completely stamp out the final two (we’ve identified them and made progress, but we’re not quite there yet.
The dysfunctions make much more sense in context, but they are (in descending order of importance):
- Absence of trust
- Fear of conflict (everyone plays politically nice)
- Lack of commitment (decisions don’t stick)
- Avoidance of accountability
- Inattention to results (individual ego vs. team success)
For those who are wondering, the two we’re still working on at the exec team level here are conflict and commitment. And the two are related. If you don’t produce engaged discussion about an issue and allow everyone to air their opinions, they will invariably be less bought into a decision (especially one they don’t agree with). But we’re getting there and will continue to work aggressively on it until we’ve rooted it out.
There’s one other interesting takeaway from the book that’s not part of the framework directly, which is that an executive has to be first and foremost a member of his/her team of peers, not the head of his/her department. That’s how successful teams get built. AND (this is key) this must trickle down in the organization as well. Everyone who manages a team of group heads or managers needs to make those people function well as a team first, then as managers of their own groups second.
At any rate, another quick gem of a book. I’m kind of sorry there’s only one left in the series.
So far the series includes:
I have one or two more to go, which I’ll tackle in due course and am looking forward to.
