Only Once

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The People Who Go to the Trainer the Most Are the Ones Who Were in the Best Shape to Begin With

The People Who Go the the Trainer the Most Are the Onese Who Were int eh Best Shape to Begin With

Have you ever noticed this?  That the people working out with trainers in the gym are usually in great shape?  So why do they keep working with the trainer?  So they maintain their awesome level of fitness, of course!

The lesson for business is the same.  Just because you have a strong suit doesn’t mean you can afford to ignore it and rest on your laurels (at least not for very long).  This is true in good times, and in bad times. 

When things are going well, it can feel like it’s the right time to turn your focus to new things, or to fixing broken things.  And that is true to some extent, but it can’t come at the expense of continuing to develop what’s working.

And the temptation to “cut and coast” in the areas of the business that are working well is especially strong when times get tough and resources are stretched.  In fact, the situation is the opposite.  When times get tough and resources are stretched, it’s even more important to double down on the parts of the business that work well. 

Why is all of this true? 

-Your strong suits have a disproportionate impact on business results.  Are you a product-first organization?  Then great product is what makes your organization successful.  Keep producing more of it.  Are you a sales-dominant organization?  Sell more.   Are you a people-first organization?  Your people don’t become less important over time.  Why would you – in any business environment – do less of what makes you successful?

- Your strong suits are bellwethers for employee insight into the organization.  The things that your company does that are best in class are the things that employees take their cues from, and that employees have the most pride in.  Let those things go – and you risk alienating your most enthusiastic employees.  This isn’t to say that companies should have “third rails,” things that are the equivalent of Social Security or the Pentagon, where the minute someone talks about a budget cut, hysteria ensues.  And it’s not about silly perks (you can be a people-first organization whether or not you have “bring your pet to work day”).  But whatever is important to you one day can’t suddenly be unimportant the next day without risking a high degree of employee whiplash.

- Your strong suits compensate for your weaknesses.  The last two points are all about strong suits being out in front.  But I’d argue that your strong suits do more than that.  They protect you from your weaknesses.  Think about it metaphorically, and relating back to the title of this post, think about the body.  When you have a broken leg, your arms get stronger because you need to use them to crutch yourself around.  If you also broke your arms, you’d have a real problem!  In business, it’s the same.  Strong sales teams tend to compensate for weak marketing teams – invest less in sales, it actually hurts marketing, too.  Strong product can compensate for weak sales teams – so more stagnant product hits twice as hard.

All this may sound obvious.  There are other comparable axioms like “put your best people on your biggest opportunities,” and “manage to your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses.”  And yet, the temptations to coast are real.  So get going to that gym and see your trainer for your weekly appointment.  Even if you’re in great shape.

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The Nachos Don’t Have Enough Beef in Them

The Nachos Don’t Have Enough Beef in Them

Short story, two powerful lessons.

Story:  I’m sitting at the bar of Sam Snead’s Tavern in Port St. Lucie, Florida, having dinner solo while I wait for my friend to arrive.  I ask the bartender where he’s from, since he has a slight accent.  Nice conversation about how life is rough in Belfast and thank goodness for the American dream.  I ask him what to order for dinner and tell him a couple menu items I’m contemplating.  He says, “I don’t know why they don’t listen to me.  I keep telling them that all the people here say that the nachos aren’t good because they don’t have enough beef in them.”  I order something else.  Five minutes later, someone else pounds his hand on the bar and barks out “Give me a Heineken and a plate of nachos.”  The bartender enters the order into the point-of-sale system.

Lesson 1:  Listen to your front-line employees – in fact, make them your customer research team.  I’ve seen and heard this time and again.  Employees deal with unhappy customers, then roll their eyes, knowing full well about all the problems the customers are encountering, and also believing that management either knows already or doesn’t care.  Or both.  There’s no reason for this!  At a minimum, you should always listen to your customer-facing employees, internalize the feedback, and act on it.  They hear and see it all.  Next best prize – ask them questions.  Better yet – get them to actively solicit customer feedback.

Lesson 2:  Always remember another person’s person-ness, especially if he or she is in a service role.  The old story about the waiter spitting and coughing in the obnoxious customer’s soup would dictate that self-preservation, if nothing else, should inspire civility towards people who are serving you, be it a B2B account manager or a waiter in a diner.  Next best prize – self-interest to get a higher level of service.  Better yet – engagement and kindness like you’d want people to show you.  Chances are, they’re trying to make your day a bit better.  Shouldn’t you try to do the same for theirs?

(Lesson 3:  Always listen to your bartender!)

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Book Short: Plain Talk

Book Short: Plain Talk

An HR rock star I met with recently told me that “You can say anything you want to your people, as long as it’s true,” which of course is great advice.  Plain Talk: Lessons from a Business Maverick (book, kindle), by Ken Iverson, the long-time CEO of Nucor, pretty much embodies that.  If you’re not familiar with Nucor, it’s a steel company – right, steel – and the most successful one of the last 50-75 years, at that.  You may think an industrial company like this offers no lessons for you.  If so, you are wrong.

The reason Nucor has been so successful, if you believe their long time leader, is that they run the people side of their business differently than most companies like them.  Reading this book from the perspective of a knowledge worker business CEO was particularly interesting, since I had to transform my frame of reference a bit (and do a little mental time travel as well) in order to understand just how revolutionary Nucor’s practices were at the time.

But then I realized – they’re still revolutionary today.  How many companies – even the most progressive ones – don’t have performance reviews because they don’t need them in order to create a high performing environment?  Companies that spend a good percentage of their time and energies thinking about how to get their employees to do their best work, as opposed to focusing only on the goals of the business, do better than those who don’t.  It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in.  As Patrick Lencioni would say, you can outbehave the competition.

Plain Talk is a really short book, and a good, authentic read if you’re a leader who cares about your people and wants to learn a few nuggets here and there from one of the 20^th century masters of that discipline.  Anyone that can link a high degree of delegation to authority has a story worth telling.

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How to Wow Your Manager

How to Wow Your Manager

Last week, I talked about how to Wow your employees.  Now I am going to discuss the converse of that – How to Wow your Manager.  Why Wow your manager?  Even if you are senior leader in an organization, the Wow factor is still important.

What impact does a Wow have?  It sends the signal that you are on top of things.  Symbolism is important.  It also advances the cause further and faster.  Why do you want to foster Wow moments with your team?  High performing teams have a lot of Wow going on.  If all members of a team see Wow regularly, they are all inspired to do more sooner, better.

Here are my top 10 examples on how to WOW your manager, along with the intended impact:

1. Show up for every check-in with the full agenda – send it a day or more ahead (Give your manager time and space to prepare)
2.  When you are asking your manager to communicate something (an email to the team, a reference letter, etc.), draft it for him or her (Editing is much easier than creating)
3.  Do a start-stop-continue analysis once a year on all of your key activities (Make yourself as efficient and effective as possible – that’s your responsibility as much as your manager’s)
4.  Own your own development plan and check in on it at least quarterly (Those who own their own career paths progress more quickly down them)
5. Read a relevant business book and ask your manager to discuss insights with you (Staying current with best practices in your field – books, articles, blog posts, videos, mentors, lectures –  is key in a learning organization)
6.  Dress for success – even casual can be neat and “client ready” (Your presence has an impact on those around you.  There’s no reason anyone should ever have to comment on your clothes, your hair, or any aspect of your personal hygiene)
7. Respond to every email where you are on the TO line within a day, even if it’s to say you will respond longer form later (At Return Path,  you have to be in the jet stream of communications. Otherwise, you find yourself in the exhaust of the jet stream)
8. End every meaningful interaction by asking for informal feedback on how you’re doing and what else you can be doing (Again, part of being in a learning organization…and taking more tasks on is always a sign that you are ready for more responsibility)
9. Do something that’s not required but that you feel is a best practice (This shows you’re on top of your game.  One example:  I send the Board a summary, the details, and the YoY trending of all of my expenses every year.  I don’t have to, but enough CEOs out there have high profile expense problems that I decided it’s a good practice.  They all LOVE it)
10.  (If you have staff reporting into you) Show up for every check-in with  your manager with a list of all staff issues and highlights (You need to bubble things up, both good and bad, so your manager is on top of his or her overall team and (a) is never surprised by events, (b) knows how best to handle skip-level communications, and (c) can think more broadly about resource deployment across the organization)

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How to Wow Your Employees

How to Wow Your Employees

Here at Return Path we like to promote a culture of WOW and a culture of hospitality.  Some of you may be asking, Why Wow your employees?   The answer is, there is nothing more inspirational than showing an employee that you care about him or her as an individual.  The impact a WOW has is tremendous.  Being a manger is like being in a fishbowl.  Everything you do is scrutinized by your team.  You lead by example whether you want to or not and showing your own vulnerability/humanity has an amazing bonding effect.

Why do you want to foster Wow moments with your team?  High performing teams have a lot of Wow going on.  If all members of a team see Wow regularly, they are all inspired to do more sooner and better.

Here are 15 ways to Wow your employees

1. Take them or her to lunch/breakfast/drinks/dinner quarterly individually, one nice one per year
2. Learn their hobbies and special interests; when you have a spiff to give, give one that is in line with these
3. Remember the names of their spouse/significant other/kids/pets
4. Share your development plan with them and ask for input against it at least quarterly
5. Respond to every email from your staff by the end of the day; sooner if you are on the TO line
6. Ask them what they think of a piece of work you’re doing
7. Ask them what they think of the direction the company is going, or a specific project
8. Periodically take something off each one’s plate, even if it’s clearly theirs to do
9. Periodically tell them to take a day off to recharge, ideally around something important in their lives
10. End every meaningful interaction by asking how they are doing and feeling about work
11. End every interaction by asking what you can be doing to help them do a better job and advance their career
12. Read all job openings and highlight ones that match their interests for future positions
13. Read the weekly award list and call out those FROM and TO your team in staff meetings
14. Send a handwritten note to their home when you have a moment of appreciation for them
15. (If your employee has a team he/she manages) Ask for input before every skip-level interaction and summarize each one after the fact in an email or in person

I try to have Wow moments regularly with people at all levels in the organization.  Here’s one that sticks with me.  At the Colorado summer party several years ago, I went up to someone who was a few layers down in the organization and said hi to her husband and dog by name.  I had met them before, and I work at remembering these things.  The husband was blown away – I hadn’t talked to him in probably two years.  In front of the employee, he gushed – “this is exactly why my wife loves working here – we are totally committed to being part of the RP family.”

There are as many ways to be a great manager and WOW your employees as there are stars in the sky…hopefully these ideas give you a framework to make these your own!

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Book Short: Entrepreneurial Lessons

Book Short:  Entrepreneurial Lessons

The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from 42 Founders, by David Kidder, is the ultimate coffee table book for entrepreneurs and people who are interested in how they think about running their businesses.

David is the author of the Intellectual Devotional series (here’s a link to one of the five or six books in the series), he’s a good friend of mine and a member of a CEO Forum that I’m in, and my major disclosure about this blog post is that I’m one of the 42 entrepreneurs David interviewed for and profiles in the book.

The Startup Playbook is very different from my own book (in progress) on being a Startup CEO.  Where my book is going to go deep on different topics – think of it as a bit of a field guide – David’s book is extremely broad in its coverage of different entrepreneurs and their stories.  Taken together, the book paints a great picture of how CEOs think about the most important parts of the job.  It’s also a nice change of pace (for me, anyway) that David profiles some entrepreneurs who aren’t in the Internet/tech space.

It was an honor to be included in The Startup Playbook next to entrepreneurs like Reid Hoffman and Elon Musk.

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Taking Stock, Part II

Taking Stock, Part II

Last year, I wrote about the three questions I ask myself at the beginning of every year to make sure my career is still on track. [http://www.onlyonceblog.com/2012/01/taking-stock]   The questions are:

1. Am I having fun at work?
2. Am I learning and growing as a professional?
3. Is my work financially rewarding enough, either in the short term or in the long term?

This year, I am adding a fourth suggestion following a great conversation I had a bunch of months back with Jerry Colonna, a great CEO coach, former VC, and all around great person.  Question four is:

Am I having the impact I want to have on the world?

This last question was probably always implicit in my first two questions – but I like calling it out separately.  All of us have purpose in our lives and impact on others, whether it’s family, friends, colleagues, clients, or some slice of broader humanity.  Asking whether that impact is present and enough is just another check and balance on my own operating system to make sure that I’m still on track with my own goals and values.

Happy New Year!

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The Value of Paying Down Technical Debt

The Value of Paying Down Technical Debt

Our Engineering team has a great term called Technical Debt, which is the accumulation of coding shortcuts and operational inefficiencies over the years in the name of getting product out the door faster that weighs on the company’s code base like debt weighs on a balance sheet.  Like debt, it’s there, you can live with it, but it is a drag on the health of the technology organization and has hard servicing costs.  It’s never fun to pay down technical debt, which takes time away from developing new products and new features and is not really appreciated by anyone outside the engineering organization.

That last point is a mistake, and I can’t encourage CEOs or any leaders within a business strongly enough to view it the opposite way.  Debt may not be fun to pay off, but boy do you feel better after it’s done.  I attended an Engineering all-hands recently where one team presented its work for the past quarter.  For one of our more debt-laden features, this team quietly worked away at code revisions for a few months and drove down operational alerts by over 50% — and more important, drove down application support costs by almost 90%, and all this at a time when usage probably doubled.  Wow. 

I’m not sure how you can successfully scale a company rapidly without inefficiencies in technology.  But on the other side of this particular project, I’m not sure how you can afford NOT to work those ineffiencies out of your system as you grow.  Just as most Americans (political affiliation aside) are wringing their hands over the size and growth of our national debt now because they’re worried about the impact on future generations, engineering organizations of high growth companies need to pay attention to their technical debt and keep it in check relative to the size of their business and code base.

And for CEOs, celebrate the payment of technical debt as if Congress did the unthinkable and put our country back on a sustainable fiscal path, one way or another!

As a long Post Script to this, I asked our CTO Andy and VP Engineering David what they thought of this post before I put it up.  David’s answer was very thoughtful and worth reprinting in full:

 I’d like to share a couple of additional insight as to how Andy and I manage Tech Debt in the org: we insist that it be intentional. What do I mean by “intentional”

•  There is evidence that we should pay it
• There is a pay off at the end

 What are examples of “evidence?”

•  Capacity plans show that we’ll run out of capacity for increased users/usage of a system in a quarter or two
• Performance/stability trends are steadily (or rapidly) moving in the wrong direction
• Alerts/warnings coming off of systems are steadily or rapidly increasing

 What are examples of “pay off?”

•  Increased system capacity
• Improved performance/stability
• Decreased support due to a reduction in alerts/warnings

 We ask the engineers to apply “engineering rigor” to show evidence and pay-offs (i.e. measure, analyze, forecast).

 I bring this up because some engineers like to include “refactoring code” under the umbrella of Tech Debt solely because they don’t like the way the code is written even though there is no evidence that it’s running out of capacity, performance/stability is moving in the wrong direction, etc. This is a “job satisfaction” issue for some engineers. So, it’s important for morale reasons, and the Engineering Directors allocate _some_ time for engineers to do this type of refactoring.  But, it’s also important to help the engineer distinguish between “real” Tech Debt and refactoring for job satisfaction.

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Not Just About Us

Not Just About Us

When we updated our values this year, we felt there were a couple critical business elements missing from this otherwise “how” series of statements.  One thing missing was our clients and users!  So we added this value to our list:

Not Just About Us:  We know we’re successful when our clients are successful and our users are happy.

This may be one of the most straightforward statements of all our values, so this will be a short post.  We serve lots of constituencies at Return Path.  And we always talk about how we’re a “People First” organization and what that means.  I suppose that inherently means we are a “Client Second” organization, though I’m not sure we’d ever come out and say that.  We do believe that by being People First, we will ultimately do the best job for our customers. 

 That said, we aren’t in business just to build a great company or to have an impact on our community.  Or even our shareholders.  We are also in it for our customers.  Whether we are producing a product for mailers, for ESPs, for ISPs, for security companies, for agencies, or for end users, we can’t forget that as an important element of our success every day.

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Two Ears, One Mouth

Two Ears, One Mouth

Brace yourself for a post full of pithy quotes from others.  I’m not sure how we missed this one when drafted our original values statements at Return Path years ago, because it’s always been central to the way we operate.  We aren’t just the world’s biggest data-driven email intelligence company – we are a data-driven organization.  So another one of our newly written Core Values is:

Two Ears, One Mouth:  We ask, listen, learn, and collect data.  We engage in constructive debate to reach conclusions and move forward together.

I’m not sure which of my colleagues first said this to me, but I’m going to give credit to Anita, our long-time head of sales (almost a decade!), for saying “There’s a reason God gave you two ears and one mouth.”  The meaning?  Listen (and look, I suppose) more than you speak.

This value really has two distinct components to it, though they’re closely related.  First, we always look to collect data when we need to understand a situation or make a decision.  To quote our long-time investor, Board member, and friend Brad Feld, “the plural of anecdote is not data.”  That means we are always looking far and wide for facts, numbers, and multiple perspectives.  Some of us are better than others at relying on second-hand data and observations from trusted colleagues, which means often times, many of us are collecting data ourselves to inform a situation.  But regardless, we always start with the data.

Second, we use data as the foundation of our decision-making process.  I heard another great quote about this once, which is something like, “If we are going to make a decision based on data, the data will make the decision for us.  If we’re going to use opinion, let’s use mine.”  And while I’m at it, I’ll throw in another great quote from Winston Churchill who famously said “Facts are stubborn things.”  While we do have constructive debates all across our organization, those debates are driven by facts, not emotion.

Finally, when this value says that “we move forward together,” that is the combination of the points in the two prior paragraphs.  People may have different opinions entering a debate.  Even with a lot of data behind a decision, they may still have different opinions after a decision has been made.  But we work very deliberately to all support a decision, even one we may disagree with, and we are able to do that, move forward together, and explain the decision to the organization, because the decision is data-driven.