Stamina

A couple years ago I had breakfast with Nick Mehta, my friend who runs the incredibly exciting Gainsight.  I think at the time I had been running Return Path for 15 years, and he was probably 5 years into his journey.  He said he wanted to run his company forever, and he asked me how I had developed the stamina to keep running Return Path as long as I had.  My off the cuff answer had three points, although writing them down afterwards yielded a couple more.  For entrepreneurs who love what they do, love running and building companies for the long haul, this is an important topic.  CEOs have to change their thinking as their businesses scale, or they will self implode!  What are five things you need to get comfortable with as your business scales in order to be in it for the long haul?

Get more comfortable with not every employee being a rock star.  When you have 5, 10, or even 100 employees, you need everyone to be firing on all cylinders at all times.  More than that, you want to hire “rock stars,” people you can see growing rapidly with their jobs.  As organizations get larger, though, not only is it impossible to staff them that way, it’s not desirable either.  One of the most influential books I’ve read on hiring over the years, Topgrading (review, buy), talks about only hiring A players, but hiring three kinds of A players:  people who are excellent at the job you’re hiring them for and may never grow into a new role; people who are excellent at the job you’re hiring them for and who are likely promotable over time; and people who are excellent at the job you’re hiring them for and are executive material.  Startup CEOs tend to focus on the third kind of hire for everyone.  Scaling CEOs recognize that you need a balance of all three once you stop growing 100% year over year, or even 50%.

Get more comfortable with people quitting.  This has been a tough one for me over the years, although I developed it out of necessity first (there’s only so much you can take personally!), with a philosophy to follow.  I used to take every single employee departure personally.  You are leaving MY company?  What’s wrong with you?  What’s wrong with me or the company?  Can I make a diving catch to save you from leaving?  The reality here about why people leave companies may be 10% about how competitive the war for talent has gotten in technology.  But it’s also 40% from each of two other factors.  First, it’s 40% that, as your organization grows and scales, it may not be the right environment for any given employee any more. Our first employee resigned because we had “gotten too big” when we had about 25 employees.  That happens a bit more these days!  But different people find a sweet spot in different sizes of company.  Second, it’s 40% that sometimes the right next step for someone to take in their career isn’t on offer at your company.  You may not have the right job for the person’s career trajectory if it’s already filled, with the incumbent unlikely to leave.  You may not have the right job for the person’s career trajectory at all if it’s highly specialized.  Or for employees earlier in their careers, it may just be valuable for them to work at another company so they can see the differences between two different types of workplace.

Get more comfortable with a whole bunch of entry level, younger employees who may be great people but won’t necessarily be your friends.  I started Return Path in my late 20s, and I was right at our average age.  It felt like everyone in the company was a peer in that sense, and that I could be friends with all of them.  Now I’m in my (still) mid-40s and am well beyond our average age, despite my high level of energy and of course my youthful appearance.  There was a time several years ago where I’d say things to myself or to someone on my team like “how come no one wants to hang out with me after work any more,” or “wow do I feel out of place at this happy hour – it’s really loud here.”  That’s all ok and normal.  Participate in office social events whenever you want to and as much as you can, but don’t expect to be the last man or woman standing at the end of the evening, and don’t expect that everyone in the room will want to have a drink with you.  No matter how approachable and informal you are, you’re still the CEO, and that office and title are bound to intimidate some people.

Get more comfortable with shifts in culture and differentiate them in your mind from shifts in values.  I wrote a lot about this a couple years ago in The Difference Between Culture and Values . To paraphrase from that post, an organization’s values shouldn’t change over time, but its culture – the expression of those values – necessarily changes with the passage of time and the growth of the company.  The most clear example I can come up with is about the value of transparency and the use case of firing someone.  When you have 10 employees, you can probably just explain to everyone why you fired Joe.  When you have 100 employees, it’s not a great idea to tell everyone why you fired Joe, although you might be ok if everyone finds out.  When you have 1,000 employees, telling everyone why you fired Joe invites a lawsuit from Joe and an expensive settlement on your part, although it’s probably ok and important if Joe’s team or key stakeholders comes to understand what happened.  Does that evolution mean you aren’t being true to your value of transparency?  No.  It just means that WHERE and HOW you are transparent needs to evolve as the company evolves.

• Get more comfortable with process.  This doesn’t mean you have to turn your nimble startup into a bureaucracy.  But a certain amount of process (more over time as the company scales) is a critical enabler of larger groups of people not only getting things done but getting the right things done, and it’s a critical enabler of the company’s financial health.  At some point, you and your CFO can’t go into a room for a day and do the annual budget by yourselves any more.  But you also can’t let each executive set a budget and just add them together.  At some point, you can’t approve every hire yourself.  But you also can’t let people hire whoever they want, and you can’t let some other single person approve all new hires either, since no one really has the cross-company view that you and maybe a couple of other senior executives has.  At some point, the expense policy of “use your best judgment and spend the company’s money as if it was your own” has to fit inside department T&E budgets, or it’s possible that everyone’s individual best judgments won’t be globally optimal and will cause you to miss your numbers.  Allow process to develop organically.  Be appropriately skeptical of things that smell like bureaucracy and challenge them, but don’t disallow them categorically.  Hire people who understand more sophisticated business process, but don’t let them run amok and make sure they are thoughtful about how and where they introduce process to the organization.

I bet there are 50 things that should be on this list, not 5.  Any others out there to share?

Collaboration is Hard, Part II

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’ll answer the question I set out to answer originally, which is why is collaboration so hard?  Why does it come up on so many of our development plans year in, year out?  As always, there isn’t an answer, but here are a few of my theories:

1. It doesn’t come naturally to most of us.  Granted, this is a massive sweeping generalization, but Western culture (or at least American culture) doesn’t seem to put a premium on workplace teaming the way, say Japan does, or even Europe to a lesser extent.  The "rugged individual," to borrow a phrase from our historical past, is a very American phenomenon.  Self-reliance seems to be in our DNA, and the competitive culture that we bring to our workplace is not only to beat out competitive companies to our own, but often to beat out our colleagues to get that next promotion or raise.  The concept that "I win most when we all win" is a hard one for many of us to grasp.  Even in team sports, we celebrate individual achievement and worship heroes as much as we celebrate team championships.
2. You don’t know what you don’t know.  (with full attribution for that quote to my colleague Anita Absey.)  Since knowledge sharing and learning is at the heart of collaboration, and since collaboration doesn’t come naturally to us, that leads me to my second point.  Even if you are acting in your own self-interest most of the time at work (not that you should act that way), logic would dictate that you would be interested in collaborating just so you can learn more and do a better job in the future.  But the fact that you don’t know what you don’t know might make you far less likely to partner with a colleague on a project since you are committing an investment of your time up front with an uncertain outcome or learning at the end of it.  Only when we have had historical success collaborating with a particular individual — and learned from it and improved ourselves as a result — are we most comfortable going back to the collaboration well in the future.
   
3. It’s logistically challenging.  This may sound lame, but collaboration is hard to fit into most of our busy lives.  We all work in increasingly fast-paced environments and in a very fluid and dynamic industry.  Collaboration requires some mechanics such as lining up multiple calendars, multiple goal sets, and compromising on lots of aspects of how you would do a project on your own that present a mental hurdle to us even when we think collaboration might be the right thing to do.  With that hurdle in place, we are only inclined to collaborate when it’s most critical — which doesn’t develop the good habit of collaborating early and often.

I’m sure there are other reasons why Collaboration is Hard, but this is a start.  As I think about it, I will work on a necessary Part III as well here — how to foster collaboration in your organization.

Onboarding vs. Waterboarding

One of our new senior hires just said to me the other day that he has been enjoying his Onboarding process during his first 90 days at Return Path and that at other companies he’s worked at in the past, the first few months were more like Waterboarding.

At Return Path, we place a lot of emphasis on onboarding – the way we ask employees to spend their first 90 days on the job.  I’ve often said that the hiring process doesn’t end on the employee’s first day.  I think about the employee’s first day as the mid-point of the hiring process. The things that come after the first day — orientation (where’s the bathroom?), context-setting (here’s our mission, here’s how your job furthers it), goal setting (what’s your 90-day plan?), and a formal check-in 90 days later — are all make-or-break in terms of integrating a new employee into the organization, making sure they’re a good hire, and making them as productive as possible.

Nothing has a greater impact on a hire’s long-term viability than a thorough Onboarding. Sure, you have to get the right people in the door. But if you don’t onboard them properly, they may never work out. This is where all companies, big and small, fail most consistently.  Remember your first day of work? Did you (or anyone at the company) know where you were supposed to sit? Did you (or anyone at the company) know if your computer was set up? Did you (or anyone at the company) have a project ready for you to start on? Did you (or anyone at the company) know when you’d be able to meet your manager? Probably not.

Take onboarding much more seriously, and you’ll be astounded by the results. We have a Manager of Onboarding whose only job is to manage the first 90 days of every employee’s experience. You don’t need to go that far (and won’t be able to until you’ve scaled well past 100 employees), but here are some things you can, and must, do to assure a successful onboarding process:

1. Start onboarding before Day 1. Just as recruitment doesn’t end until Day 90, onboarding starts before Day 1. At Return Path, we ask people to create a “Wall Bio” – a one-page collage of words and images that introduces them to the team – before their first day. It’s a quick introduction to our company culture, and something the rest of our team looks forward to seeing as new people join. Your project can be different, but it’s important to get new hires engaged even before their first day.

2. Set up your new hire’s desk in advance. There is nothing more dispiriting than spending your first day at new job chasing down keyboards and trying to figure out your phone extension. We go to the opposite extreme. When a new hire walks in the door at Return Path, their desk is done. Their computer, monitor and telephone are set up. There’s a nameplate on their office or cube. They’ve got a full set of company gear (T-shirt, tote, etc.). To show how excited we are, we even include a bottle of champagne and a handwritten note from me welcoming them to the company. In the early days of the business, we even had the champagne delivered to the employee’s home after they accepted the offer. (That didn’t scale well, particularly outside of New York City.)

3. Prepare an orientation deck for Day 1. There are certain things about your company that new hires will learn as they go along: nuances of culture, pacing, etc. But there are some things that should be made explicit right away. What is the company’s mission? What are its values? How is the organization structured? What is the current strategic plan? These details are common to every employee, and all new hires should hear them—preferably from the CEO. You can present these details one-on-one to your direct reports, or do larger in-office sessions to groups of new hires over breakfast or lunch.

4. Clearly set 90-day objectives and goals. Other details are going to be specific to an employee’s position. What’s their job description (again)? What are the first steps they should take? Resources they should know about? People they should meet? Training courses to enroll in? Materials to read and subscribe to? Finally, and most importantly, what are the major objectives for their first 90 days? They shouldn’t spend their first quarter “feeling around.” They should spend it actively and intentionally working toward a clear goal.

5. Run a review process at the end of 90 days. Whether you do a 360 review or a one-way performance review, the 90-day mark is a really good point to pull up and assess whether the new hire is working out and fitting culturally as well. It’s much easier to admit a mistake at this point and part ways while the recruiting process is still somewhat fresh than it is months down the road after you’ve invested more and more in the new hire.

With that, the hiring process is done. Now, repeat.

[Note:  this post contains some passages excerpted from my book, Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, published by Wiley & Sons earlier this fall.]

I used to describe our culture and our employees and our leaders at Return Path as a family.

That was a mistake. It was just plain wrong. It served us well in some respects, but it bit us in the ass on others.

Great groupings of people at work are teams, not families. You can have a highly functional family. But you don’t have high performing families. Work teams need to be high performing.

Here’s what I mean.

The family metaphor worked well at Return Path around the principles of caring for people and lifting each other up. Those elements of a culture are absolutely critical. I don’t regret them for a minute.

But the downside of that metaphor is that families by definition stay families. Sure, spouses can get divorced, but usually not after years of trying to make it work. And kids and parents can’t stop being relatives. Families also don’t typically have metrics and have a structural impetus to improve how they relate to each other, or to some kind of tangible output.

The practical problem with the family metaphor comes down to holding on to people too long when those people aren’t performing well. While I am a big believer that past high performance is both an indicator of future high performance and earns you as an employee a little extra grace when something goes wrong, those things can’t be absolute in business, and they have a clock on them. High performing businesses go the extra mile for their people when their people are going through a rough patch in their lives, and they should be willing to invest in coaching and development when their people need a boost or some kind of corrective action. But not indefinitely.

So even with all the caring and lifting each other up…the family is just the wrong metaphor for a business.

Here’s why the team is the right one, and I’ll use the language of sports teams here a bit more than I normally do.

Teams train together. They have a common goal, which is winning. They know that they are only as good as their weakest link. They have leaders like coaches, managers, GMs, and captains, who they look to for guidance and direction. They are disappointed when they fall short of their goals.

But — and this is the critical learning — the best teams, the highest performing teams in the world, don’t only focus on performance, metrics, and improvement. They care about their people and lift them up. Sure, there are winning teams with tyrannical bosses like the 1970s Yankees. But would you have rather been on one of the George Steinbrenner/Billy Martin teams, or worked for Joe Torre or even Joe Girardi?

The best groupings of people at work are high performing teams…AND they care about each other as people. They just don’t care about each other as people to the detriment of the team, at least not longer than a very brief cure period would allow when something goes sideways.

You can lead your organization to have the orientation of a team, with some of the best elements of families. But not the other way around.

Last week, I blogged a podcast riff I did about the biggest mistakes early stage founders make and what to do about them. Here’s a summary of part 2 of what I said about later stage founders.

1. Misreading Product/Market Fit or a lack of Product/Market Fit. Misread it high, and founders end up dumping money into sales and marketing too soon. Misread it too low, and you can fire a good sales or marketing team when it’s not their fault!
   
   On the high side, Product/Market Fit isn’t just coming from a healthy CAC/LTV ratio or by good early adoption. Early adoption can come from a small group of Visionaries (here I’m channeling Geoffrey Moore’s Technology Adoption Lifecycle curve from Crossing the Chasm), so understanding how extensible your early adopter crowd is — and how easy it will be to reach the next batch of customers and the next batch and the next batch — can be costly to get wrong. The opposite is also true. It’s easy to get caught up in a wave of enthusiasm around early Product/Market Fit and then determine that a slowdown in sales is a sales problem, when in fact, you either didn’t have true Product/Market Fit beyond visionaries in the first place…or maybe you had it, but the market changed over time, and it slipped away. Product could easily be the culprit here, not Sales or Marketing. You have to constantly go back and re-test your assumptions and lean canvas with the market as products mature and more substitutes and competitors are available.
   
2. Throwing people at problems. It’s so easy to do this. Building automation, designing new business processes, and implementing new — or worse, changed over — systems are hard, expensive, and time consuming. So yes, sometimes it makes sense to just hire that extra person or two in something like account management or accounts receivable/collections instead of investing in process. But do too much of that, and you will drown in your cost structure.
   
   Founders have to learn to embrace the tear-down. Remember, you’re an entrepreneur. You’re creative. You like to invent things and disrupt things. That includes things you yourself built! Better to tear down an existing process or system and replace it with something quantum leaps more efficient for scale than to throw people at problems.
   
3. Believing that they and they alone must continue to drive their culture forward. Cultures are truly hard to scale.
   
   But there’s a trick to scaling them. The trick is to stop doing the work yourself, and partner with your HR/People team to build your cultural touchpoints (values, artifacts, etc.) throughout your employee lifecycle so that everyone in the company (NOT just HR/People) becomes a cultural steward. Recruit and interview against your values. Onboard people with founder sessions on values and culture. Bake those things into performance management and compensation.

I’m sure there are so many other top mistakes for later stage CEOs/founders. What are the ones you’ve encountered?

It’s good that my friend Brad Feld‘s new book (co-authored by Dave Jilk, who I’ve also known on and off over the years), is divided into 52 chapters and is designed as a bit of a devotional, to be read one chapter per week.

Each chapter of The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors is, as the authors write in the Introduction, worth “chewing on a while.” The structure of the book is laid out as:

The book contains fifty-two individual chapters (one for each week) and is divided into five major sections (Strategy, Culture, Free Spirits, Leadership, and Tactics). Each chapter begins with a quote from one of Nietzsche’s works, using a public domain translation, followed by our own adaptation of the quote to 21st-century English. Next is a brief essay applying the quote to entrepreneurship. About two-thirds of the chapters include a narrative by or about an entrepreneur we know (or know of), telling a concrete story from their personal experience as it applies to the quote, the essay, or both.

That structure is perfect for me. I did ok in Philosophy classes, but I wouldn’t say it was my preferred subject. So the fact that Brad and Dave turned every Nietzsche quote into plain English before applying it to entrepreneurship and disruption was a welcome tactic to make the book as accessible as possible.

I wrote one of the essays in the book on creating a Company Operating System, which is in the chapter called “Doing is not Leading.” It’s an honor to be included as a contributor alongside a number of awesome CEOs, including Reid Hoffman, Ingrid Alongi, Daniel Benhammou, Sal Carcia, Ben Casnocha, Ralph Clark, David Cohen, Mat Ellis, Tim Enwall, Nicole Glaros, Will Herman, Mike Kail, Luke Kanies, Walter Knapp, Gary LaFever, Tracy Lawrence, Jenny Lawton, Seth Levine, Bart Lorang, David Mandell, Jason Mendelson, Tim Miller, Matt Munson, Ted Myerson, Bre Pettis, Laura Rich, Jacqueline Ros, and Jud Valeski.

In his Foreword, Reid Hoffman connects the dots perfectly:

Returning to Nietzsche, let’s examine why he in particular is such an apt patron philosopher for entrepreneurs. Nietzsche was rebelling against a stultifying philosophical practice that exalted the past—specifically the ideals and images of former thinkers and former leaders. He wanted to refocus on the now, on what humanity was and what it could become. As part of his rebellion, Nietzsche philosophized with a hammer: he wanted to destroy the old mindsets that locked people into the past, and thus better equip them to embrace the possibility of the new. Nietzsche’s desire to shift mindsets is also why he emphasized new styles of argument. Whereas most philosophers would typically open an argument in a classical form or by reviewing a historical great, Nietzsche would lead with an arresting aphorism or a completely new mythological narrative. He was, above all else, a disruptor of pieties and convention, always in search of new and original ways to be contrarian and right, never satisfied with the status quo. This is exactly the kind of mindset entrepreneurs should adopt. This is why a daily practice of philosophy can be the way that an entrepreneur moves from good to great. And, why a daily practice of Nietzsche is a great practice of philosophy for entrepreneurs.

What I love about the book is that you can read any given chapter at any time without having to read it front to back, and the combination of Nietzsche and entrepreneur essays makes the topics come to list. Pick one — they are organized into five sections, Strategy, Culture, Free Spirits, Leadership, and Tactics — and you’re sure to get both something chewy (e.g, thoughtful) and delicious (e.g., practical).

The Tension That Will Come With the Future of Work

A lot has been written about the Work From Anywhere life that knowledge workers are leading right now due to the pandemic, and what will come next.  Fred has a great post on it, and I’m curious to see how his and Joanne’s “Home Office Away From Home” space called FrameWork does when it opens.  In that post, he references a few other posts and articles worth reading:

• Imagine Your Flexible Office Work Future – Anne Helen Petersen
• We’re Never Going Back – Packy McCormick
• The Future of Offices When Workers Have Choice – Dror Poleg

Instead of entering the debate about what the future will look like, which no one really knows other than to say “not like the past,” I want to focus on a tension I’ve been mulling over lately, and that is the tension between a company’s leaders and its employees.  You could also call it a tension between extroverts and introverts.  And in this regard, Packy McCormick is both right and wrong about the debate:  right in the sense that employees will make the decision, not companies; wrong in the sense that the best employees “are not going to work for companies that make them shave, get dressed, hop into a car or a crowded subway, and sit at a desk in an office five days a week with their headphones on trying to avoid distractions and get work done.”  That’s a blanket statement that, as with most blanket statements, misses an incredibly important point.

That some people like, want to, need to, or benefit from working in offices more often than not.

That those people are some of the most talented, creative, and high potential people in an organization.

And that those people are frequently the ones with the least “voice” in an organization — new employees, younger workers, introverts, and people from underrepresented groups.

It will be really easy for senior people who, in many cases, have longer commutes and kids they are now accustomed to seeing a lot more, not to mention really nice and private home offices, to default to working from home.  In many cases, they’ve already done more of that than most employees, well, because they can.  But the problem is that those people are perfectly fine working from home.  Work and decisions come to them.  Their career trajectories are pretty set.  They will seek out anyone in the organization to ask them any question, any time.

But think about the topic from the perspective of an entry level account coordinator, an associate product manager, a graphic designer in marketing, a financial analyst in the FP&A group, or an AR specialist in accounting. .  Less exposure to decision makers can’t possibly help this.  If you’re one of those people, here are the things you miss out on when there’s no office:

• You don’t get to participate in or overhear interesting conversations in the break/lunch room or at the water cooler about something going on in the company that you’re not working on.  This reduces your ability to learn in unstructured ways at work or get thoroughly onboarded into a new company
• You don’t get to see who comes and goes from the office or different meeting rooms.  This may sound silly, but watching a business in, seeing who is in a glass-walled conference room or what slides are up on the wall, helps employees stimulate good ideas about their day to day work.  This limits your ability to connect the dots and better understand the big picture at work 
• You don’t get to have a casual conversation with your department head or CEO in the elevator or hallway or a conference room between meetings.  That “skip level” leader is much less likely to know who you are or what you do.  This can make it harder for you, the next time you have an idea you want to share or feedback you want to give, to approach a leader.  It also makes it a little tougher for you the next time you’re in line for some kind of promotion or development opportunity

Of course all employees CAN in theory make themselves known, can learn, can seek out others in the organization, and can try to re-create hallway serendipity from the comfort of their own Zoom screens.  It just doesn’t come naturally to most; practically speaking for many, it’s impossible; and it’s particularly hard for younger or quieter team members.  There’s a ton of research about how women in particular aren’t as comfortable advocating for themselves when it comes time to ask for a raise or a promotion.  If you’re the CEO of a 100 person organization, you might be inclined to chat with the new entry level AR person at the coffee machine for a few minutes; you’re unlikely to be excited about a 30-minute Zoom with her.  

(By the way, this whole construct may be different for engineering, where engineers are likely more comfortable with remote work AND aren’t held back in their career development as a result.)

I’ll close this post with an anecdote.  As part of our work at Bolster, I was doing something called an Executive Team Scalability Assessment with the CEO of a $75mm SaaS company a month or so ago.  When we were doing a review of how strongly each of his leaders role modeled company values, he paused when he got to one leader and said, “I honestly don’t know.  That person has only been here 10 months, but don’t worry, that’s just because of the pandemic.  I haven’t seen them in action.”  10 months!  People will discover at some point that it was much easier to “lift and shift” an existing organization to the cloud in year 1 of the pandemic than it will be to sustain or build a culture with a lot of new employees in year 2 or 3 of remote-first work.

CEOs who care about their culture, their people, inclusion and belonging, and their people’s professional development will have to really re-think how things work if they are going to steer their companies towards remote-only policies, or even remote-first employees, and still be inclusive workplaces.  That doesn’t mean it can’t be done.  But gravitating to a remote-only way of life, even if it’s personally enticing or if some talented and vocal employees demand it, may not be in the best interest of their overall company and employee population.

We run a massive employee survey every year or so called The Loop, which is powered by Culture Amp.  We are big fans of Culture Amp, as they provide not only a great survey tool but benchmarks of relevant peer companies so our results can be placed in external context as well as internal context.

The survey is anonymous and only really rolled up to large employee groups (big teams, departments, offices, etc.), and we take the results very seriously.  Every year we run it, we create an Organization Development Plan out of the results that steers a lot of the work of our Leadership team and People team for the coming year.

I just read every single comment that employees took the time to write out in addition to their checkbox or rating responses.  This year, that amounted to over 1,200 verbatim comments.  I am struggling to process all of them, for a bunch of reasons you’d expect.  Next year we may give employees some examples of comments that are hard to process so they understand what it’s like to read all of them…and we may reduce the number of places where employees can make comments so we try to get only the most important (and more detailed) comments from people to keep the volume a little more manageable.

But I thought it might be useful to give some general advice to people who write comments on anonymous surveys.  Your company may have every good intention of following up on every last comment in an employee survey (we do!), but it’s difficult to do so when:

• The comment is not actionable.  For example, “The best thing about working at Return Path is…’I can afford to live nearby.'”  That doesn’t do much for us!
• The comment is too vague.  For example, “I’m not the engineer I was a year ago” – we have no idea what that means.  Is it a plus or a minus?  What is behind it?
• The comment is likely to be in conflict with other comments and doesn’t give enough detail to help resolve conflicts.  40 positive comments about the lunch program in an office and 40 negative comments about the lunch program in the same office kind of get washed out, but “Lunches are good, but please have more gluten-free options” is super helpful.
• The comment lacks context.  When the answer to the question “What would be the one thing we could do right away to make RP a better place to work?” is “Investing in some systems,” that doesn’t give us a starting point for a next step.
• The commenter disqualifies him or herself.  Things like “Take everything I’m saying with a grain of salt…I’m just an engineer and have no real idea of what I’m doing” that punctuate a comment are challenging to process.
• The commenter forgets that the comments are anonymous.  “I have serious problems with my manager and often think of leaving the company” is a total bummer to hear, but there’s not a lot we can do with it.  I hope with something like this that you are also having a discussion with someone on the People team or your manager’s manager!

We’re doing everything employees would expect us to do – reading the ratings and comments, looking at trends over time, breaking them down by office and department, and creating a solid Organizational Development Plan that we’ll present publicly and follow up on…but hopefully this is useful for our company and others in the future as a guide to more actionable commenting in employee surveys.

Most psychologists, and lots of executive coaches, end up talking to their clients about their “Family of Origin” as a means of more deeply understanding the origins of their clients’ motivations, fears, hopes, and dreams.  Presumably they do this in service of helping their clients gain self-awareness around those things to be more effective in their personal or professional lives.

A smattering of highly-ranked search results on the term yields snippets like these for its definition:

• One’s family of origin—the family one grew up in, as opposed to the people one currently lives with—is the place that people typically learn to become who they are
• From the family of origin a person learns how to communicate, process emotions, and get needs met
• People also learn many of their values and beliefs from their families

…and these for its impact:

• As a worker, your experiences in your family of origin are likely to impact on the way you work
• Families always involve negative and positive dynamics, which may lead to members gaining strengths and abilities or experiencing difficulties
• Differentiation from family is a significant concept. Well-differentiated people function better
• Greater awareness of the impact of your family of origin on you will benefit your work

I’m no shrink, nor am I an executive coach, but this makes sense to me, and I’ve seen it in action many times in both my personal and professional life.

The concept I want to introduce today is a related and in some ways parallel one, and one that I think may be equally if not more important to how someone behaves professionally.  That concept is the Company of Origin.  I’ll define one’s Company of Origin is the first place or places one has meaningful work experience.  For most working professionals, that is probably the first full-time job we held for at least a couple of years after college or graduate school.  For others, it may be a couple of long-held part-time jobs during school.  There are probably other cases, but hopefully you get the point.  A couple of my trusted colleagues in the HR/OD profession suggested that this could also be labeled Profession of Origin or Manager of Origin or “When I came into my own as a professional.”  I think the same concepts apply.

Going back to the definition above of Family of Origin and modifying it (only slightly) to define Company of Origin would look something like this:

• One’s Company of Origin – the first place or places one has a meaningful work experience, as opposed to the place one currently works – is the place that people typically learn to become who they are professionally
• From one’s Company of Origin, a person learns how to communicate at work, how to experience success and failure, what accountability means, what reward and recognition mean, what good and bad management and leadership look like, etc. etc.
• People also learn many of their professionals values and beliefs from their Companies of Origin

I know this rings true for me in my own life.  My first job as a management consultant still has a profound influence over my work today.  My first few jobs before I started Return Path all had a profound influence over how I decided to set a culture and make decisions (and still do, though a bit less with each passing year).  Some of those influences were positive – “let’s do more of that!” – and some were negative – “if I ever become the boss, I’ll never…” – but you’d expect that from a Company of Origin, just as you would a Family of Origin.

It also rings true for countless other people I’ve worked with over the years.  Think about people you’ve worked with.  Have you ever said or thought anything like this before?

• Bob used to work at GE.  That’s why he has such strong leadership skills
• Why is Jane so concerned with expenses?  Her first job was at a family-run business where every dollar spent was a dollar out of the CEO’s pocket
• Wow is Harry political at work.  I guess it’s because he used to work at XYZ Corp where people stab each other in the back to get promoted
• Oh, Sally is ex-military.  That’s why she’s so hierarchical
• Doesn’t Doug understand that part of being an employee here is doing XYZ?  That’s not how he was conditioned to think at work when he worked at PDQ Corp.  He’s just hard wired that way
• Frank just loves standing up in front of a room and drawing things on a whiteboard.  I guess that’s because he started his career as a teacher

Of course, unlike a Family of Origin, you don’t have to live in some way with your Company of Origin forever, and unlike family configurations, where the average person will have a few in a lifetime, the average person will have many places of work.  All of those workplaces will shape one’s behaviors in the workplace.  But there’s something about the Company of Origin that sticks with professionals more than other workplaces.

Again, going back to those “impact” comments about Family of Origin and modifying them only slightly for Company of Origin, you get this:

• As a worker, your experiences in your Company of Origin are likely to impact on the way you work
• Companies always involve negative and positive dynamics, which may lead to employees gaining different strengths and abilities or experiencing difficulties or experiencing the workplace differently
• Differentiation from Company of Origin is a significant concept. Well-differentiated people function better as they move from job to job
• Greater awareness of the impact of your Company of Origin on you will benefit your work

As I wrote several years ago, People Should Come with an Instruction Manual.  Understanding your potential employees’ and actual employees’ Companies of Origin would go a LONG way towards fleshing out their strengths, weaknesses, likely behaviors, likely fits with your culture and organization, and on and on.  Whether during the interview process for candidates or the development planning/360 process for employees, I hope this concept is something useful to consider.

I’ve written a lot over the years about Return Path’s Core Values (summary post with lots of links to other posts here).  And I’ve also written and believe strongly that there’s a big difference between values, which are pretty unchanging, and culture, which can evolve a lot over time.  But I had a couple conversations recently that led me to think more philosophically about a company’s values.

The first conversation was at a recent dinner for a group of us working on fundraising for my upcoming 25th reunion from Princeton.  Our guest speaker was a fellow alumnus who I’ve gotten to know and respect tremendously over the years as one of the school’s most senior and influential volunteer leaders.  He was speaking about the touchstones in his life and in all people’s lives — things like their families, their faith, the causes they’re passionate about, and the institutions they’ve been a part of.  I remember this speaker giving a similar set of remarks right after the financial crisis hit in early 2009.  And it got me thinking about the origins of Return Path’s values, which I didn’t create on my own, but which I obviously had a tremendous amount of influence over as founder.  Where did they come from?  Certainly, some came from my parents and grandparents.  Some came from my primary and secondary education and teachers.  Some came from other influences like coaches, mentors, and favorite books.  Although I’m not overly observant, some certainly came from Hebrew school and even more so from a deep reading of the Bible that I undertook about 15 years ago for fun (it was much more fun than I expected!).  Some came from other professional experiences before I started Return Path.  But many of them either came from, or were strongly reinforced by my experience at Princeton.  Of the 15 values we currently articulate, I can directly tie at least seven to Princeton:  helpful, thankful, data-driven, collaborative, results-oriented, people first, and equal in opportunity.  I can also tie some other principles that aren’t stated values at Return Path, but which are clearly part of our culture, such as intellectually curious, appreciative of other people’s points of view, and valuing an interdisciplinary approach to work.

As part of my professional Reboot project, this was a good reminder of some of the values I know I’ve gotten from my college experience as a student and as an alumni, which was helpful both to reinforce their importance in my mind but also to remember some of the specifics around their origins – when and why they became important to me.  I could make a similar list and trade and antecedents of all or at least most of our Company’s values back to one of those primary influences in my life.  Part of Reboot will be thinking through all of these and renewing and refreshing their importance to me.

The second conversation was with a former employee who has gone on to lead another organization.  It led me to the observation I’ve never really thought through before, that as a company, we ourselves have become one of those institutions that imprints its values into the minds of at least some of its employees…and that those values will continue to be perpetuated, incorporated, and improved upon over time in any organization that our employees go on to join, manage part of, or lead.

That’s a powerful construct to keep in mind if you’re a new CEO working on designing and articulating your company’s values for the first time.  You’re not just creating a framework to guide your own organization.  You’re creating the beginning of a legacy that could potentially influence hundreds or thousands of other organizations in the future.

(The following post was written by one of Return Path’s long-time senior managers, Chris Borgia, who runs one of our data science teams and has run other support organizations in the past, both at Return Path and at AOL.  I don’t usually run guest posts, but I loved the topic with Chris suggested it, and it’s a topic that I’d only have a limited perspective on!)

Managing Up in a Growing, Global Workplace

For many years, I thought “managing up” was a cheap way of getting ahead. I thought someone who managed up was skilled at deceiving their boss into thinking they were more accomplished than they really were.

I have since learned that managing up, or managing your boss, is not devious, but is actually a valuable discipline. When you learn to manage up successfully, you empower your boss to better represent your interests to influencers in the organization.

If you are a manager, you should realize that in addition to managing your boss, you can help your employees effectively manage you. When our employees help us to be successful, we are further enabled to invest in their success. This symbiosis is seen in any relationship – the more you help the other person, the more they will be able to – and want to – help you. If you are a manager, it’s important to realize that your employees should be managing up, and you can encourage them to do so by being vulnerable, admitting ignorance, and asking for support.

There are many books and articles on managing up or managing one’s boss. The essentials are fairly consistent:

• Understand your boss’s goals, priorities, and needs
• Know your boss’s strengths and weaknesses
• Set mutual expectations to build trust
• Communicate and keep your boss informed

You’ll need to be intentional about the essentials no matter where you work, but there are additional challenges of managing up in a growing, global workplace like Return Path. In a growing company, you’re likely to work for a boss who is new to their role, the company or the industry. In a global company, you may report to a boss who works in another office, or even in another country. The fundamental aspects of managing up are the same, but these situations can require a tailored approach.

When your boss is new to their role, the company, or the industry

In a growing company, you’re likely to report to someone who is new to their role in the company, new to the company itself, or even new to the industry. You can be invaluable to your boss in closing the knowledge gap and enabling them to make the best decisions for you and your team.

• Process Help your boss understand how the department operates. How are goals and priorities determined? How do people communicate? What does the team expect from the boss?
• People If your boss doesn’t know the people, they may lack the appropriate empathy in a given situation. Help them understand your team’s needs and how their decisions impact the people.
• Decision Making Your boss will likely need additional data to help them make decisions. Providing your boss with this data up front, saving them from admitting ignorance, will go a long way to developing a strong relationship.
• Context Sometimes your boss won’t know what they don’t know, so providing your boss the context around issues, decisions, and goals will enable them to make the best decisions for your team.

When your boss works in another office or country

In a global workplace, it’s likely that at some point you will have a boss who works in another office or even in another country. Having a remote boss offers many opportunities for managing up.

• Visibility Your boss doesn’t see you – or possibly others on the team – every day, so you might want to communicate more about the day-to-day operations of the team. At times, it will feel like you are sharing minutia, but it’s likely your boss will find this valuable in developing a complete understanding of what is going on.
• Insight If you work in a core office, you have a tremendous opportunity to be your boss’s eyes and ears.  What are you seeing or hearing locally that might change your boss’s plans or perspective? What are people worried about? Are there any rumors your boss should be aware of?
• Culture If your boss is in a different country, you will need to develop a relationship that considers any cultural differences. Cultural differences are seen in office attire, working hours, email habits, vacation schedules, and more. Bosses in some cultures may expect more deference, while in others they may expect more direct honesty. Understanding your boss’s culture, and helping her understand yours, will develop mutual respect and expectations to make each other successful.

Your relationship with your boss is a symbiotic one. Your boss can’t be successful unless you are, so they are your champion.  Learning to effectively manage up, especially in a growing, global workplace, is not nefarious business. Your boss will represent and support you to the best of their abilities. The more you enable your boss, the better they can support you, and everybody wins.