What a View, Part II

In Part I, I talked about how Return Path’s 360 reviews have become a central part of our company’s human capital strategy over the past five years.  While most staff members’ reviews have been done for weeks or months now, I just finished up the final portion of my own review, which I think is worth sharing.

I always include my Board in my own 360.  My process is as follows:

1. I send the Board all the raw (and summarized) data from the staff reviews of me, both quantitative and qualitative.

2. I send the Board a list of questions to think about in terms of their view of my performance (see below).

3. I have a third party moderator, in my case a great OD consultant/executive coach that I work with, Marc Maltz from Triad Consulting, meet with the Board (without me present) for 1-2 hours to moderate a discussion of these questions.

4. The moderator summarizes the conversation and helps me marry the feedback from the Board with the feedback from my team.

The questions I ask them to consider are different from the question my staff answers about me, because the relationship and perspective are different.  For each question, I also summarize what their collective response was the prior year to refresh their memory.

1. Staff management/leadership:  How effective am I at building and maintaining a strong, focused, cohesive team?  Do I have the right people in the right roles at the senior staff level?

2. Resource allocation:  Do I do a good enough job balancing among competing priorities internally?  Are costs adequately managed?

3. Strategy:  Did you feel like last year’s strategy session was thorough enough?  Do you think we’re on target with what we’re doing?  Am I doing a good enough job managing to it while being nimble enough to respond to the market?

4. Execution:  How do I and the team execute vs. plan?  What do you think I could be doing to make sure the organization executes better?

5. Board management/investor relations:  Do you think our board is effective and engaged?  Have I played enough of a role in leading the group?  Do you as a director feel like you’re contributing all you can contribute?  Do I strike the right balance between asking and telling?  Are communications clear enough and regular enough?

6. Please comment on how I have handled some of the major issues in the past 12 months (with a listing of critical incidents).

The feedback I got is incredibly valuable, and once I marry it with the feedback I got from my staff, I will have my own killer development plan for the next 12-24 months.

Counter Cliche:  Failure Is Not an Orphan

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

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

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

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

Book Short:  Fables and Morals

Courtesy of my colleague Stephanie Miller, I had a quick holiday read of Aesop & The CEO: Powerful Business Lessons from Aesop and America’s Best Leaders, by David Noonan, which I enjoyed.  The book was similar in some ways to Squirrel, Inc., which I recently posted about, in that it makes its points by allegory and example (and not that it’s relevant, but that it relies on animals to make its points).

Noonan takes a couple dozen of Aesop’s ancient Greek fables and groups them in to categories like Rewards & Incentives, Management & Leadership, Strategy, HR, Marketing, and Negotiations & Alliances – and for each one, he gives modern-day management examples of the lessons.

For example, in the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, the lesson clearly is to strike while the iron is hot, or that a good plan executed today is better than a perfect one that’s too late.  Noonan gives the example of Patton’s capture of Messina, Sicily during World War II.

And in The Hare & The Tortoise, where of course the moral is that slow & steady wins the race, Noonan gives the example of how New York Knicks coach Rick Pitino inspired Mark Jackson, who was chosen 18th in the NBA draft, to win the rookie of the year award in 1987 by helping him gain confidence by building on his strengths.

All in, a good read, even with that painful reminder that the Knicks used to have a decent basketball team.

Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less, by Leidy Klotz is a great read, and in concert with the philosophy of the book, this will be a short blog post.

The book’s basic premise is that less is more, addition by subtraction. The author’s examples range from the genius of the Strider Bike (bike without pedals) that allows 2-year olds to ride bikes to the Embarcadero in San Francisco. Many people don’t remember that that road used to be called the Embarcaro Freeway, a massive, ugly, two-tiered structure that blocked out the views and waterfront, and that the opportunity to tear down the whole thing following the massive 189 earthquake left San Francisco with a much simpler, beautiful, liveable waterfront by the Ferry Terminal.

There are many great takeaways in the book as well as an action plan for how to think about subtracting AND adding, not just adding, which is the normal reflex for humans, and I’d add ESPECIALLY for entrepreneurs!

We put these principles into action a couple weeks ago at Bolster. When we were crafting our 2024 plan, we worked methodically as a leadership team to reduce. We cut out words, but we also cut out topics and strategic initiatives. The end product was less than 50% the size (word for word) of the 2023 plan, and I think it’s much crisper, more memorable, and more actionable for our team than last year’s.

Hopefully over time, we will find more occasions to do less.

I’ll close with two of my favorite quotes, both of which were in the book. One is by Mark Twain, which is “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” The other is by Lao Tzu, which is “To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day.”

Sometimes less takes more time. But it’s almost always more valuable.