Category Archives: Culture

Not in My Kitchen, You Don’t: Leaders as Norm Setters

Posted on January 13, 2019 | 8 comments

There are two types of restaurants:  those where it’s acceptable for a cook to pickup dropped food and serve it, and those where it’s not.

food on floor 2

Sure, when asked, everyone would say it’s unacceptable to serve dropped food in their kitchen.  But is that how their kitchen actually runs?  One of my favorite definitions of culture is, to paraphrase Henry Ford’s thoughts on quality, “what happens when no one is watching.”

And if managers really run such clean kitchens, then why are there so many:

  • Websites with typos?
  • Webinars with logistics problems at the start?
  • Demonstrations where something breaks?
  • Presentations where the numbers don’t foot?
  • Customer meetings that start late?

The fact is most managers say they run kitchens where it’s unacceptable to serve food that was dropped on the floor, but all too often they don’t.  Dropped food gets served all the time by corporate America.  Why?  Because too few leaders remember that a key part of their job is to set norms — in our company, in our culture, what’s acceptable and what’s not.

Defining these norms is more important than defining quarterly OKRs or MBOs — both because they persist over time and because they help define culture — yet few managers treat them as such.  Sure, some managers like to emphasize values, and will frequently story-tell about a focus on Trust or Customer Success.  And that’s great.  But that’s all positive reinforcement.  Part of norm setting — particularly the part that says what’s not acceptable is our culture — needs to be negative reinforcement:  you can’t do that here.

gordon

That’s why I love Gordon Ramsey and his shows like Hell’s Kitchen.  “YOU CAN’T SERVE THAT, IT’S BLOODY RAW!”

He is a clear, if overzealous, communicator who sets very clear norms.  The power of norms is that, once set, the culture reinforces them.  Everyone quickly understands that in our kitchen you don’t serve dropped food and people will call each other out if someone attempts to do so.

I remember over a decade ago, mixed in a deluge of corrections I’d made on a press release, I wrote something like this:

“No, No, No, No, No, Goddammit, No — Never [break this rule and do that].”

The guy who wrote the press release was new.  He complained to HR that my feedback created a hostile work environment.  The complaint made me pause.  Then I thought:  you know what, for someone who writes like that guy does, I want it to be a hostile environment.  Cook like that in someone else’s kitchen.  But not in mine.  (Yes, he quit shortly thereafter.)

Over time I’ve learned that you don’t need to scream like Ramsey (or my younger self) to establish clear norms.  You just need one, simple, almost magical word:  unacceptable.  Just as it’s unacceptable in this kitchen to serve food that’s been dropped on the floor:

  • It’s unacceptable in this marketing team to publish work with typos.  (Work on your writing skills and have a better process.)
  • It’s unacceptable in this events team to have logistical problems at the start of an event.  (Test them all, three times if necessary, before running the webinar.)
  • It’s unacceptable in this SC team to have demos crash during sales calls.  (Test every click before you start, and don’t go off-road for the fun of it.)
  • It’s unacceptable in this finance team to create slides where the numbers don’t foot.  (Cross-check your own work and then have someone else cross-check it again.  Or, better yet, use a system to publish the numbers off one database.)
  • It’s unacceptable in this sales organization to start customer meetings late.  (Our standard practice is to book the meeting room 30 mins before the meeting start, arrive 30 mins early, and test all logistics.)

When it comes to norms, you get what you expect.  And when you don’t get it, you need to be clear:  what happened is unacceptable [1].

Since this is all pretty simple, then why do so few managers spend time defining and enforcing such operational norms?

First, it will make you unpopular.  It’s far easier to be “surprised” that the webinar didn’t work for anyone on Chrome or “understanding” that sometimes demos do crash or “realistic” that we’ll never eliminate every typo on the website.  But remember, even here you are norm-setting; you’re just setting the wrong norms.  You’re saying that all these thing are, in fact, acceptable.

Second, it’s hard because you need to be black-and-white.  A typo is black-and-white.  Numbers that don’t foot are black-and-white.  But amateurish PowerPoint clip art, poorly written paragraphs, or an under-prepared sales presentation are grey.  You’ll need to impose a black-and-white line in defining norms and let people know when they’re below it.  Think:  “this is not good enough and I don’t want to debate it.”

Third, your employees will complain that you’re a micro-manager.  No one ever calls Gordon Ramsey a micro-manager for intercepting the service of under-cooked scallops, but your employees will be quick to label you one for catching typos, numbers that don’t foot, and other mistakes.  They’ll complain to their peers.  They’ll cherry-pick your feedback, telling colleagues that all you had were a bunch of edits and you weren’t providing any real macro-value on the project [2].  You can get positioned as a hyper-critical, bad guy or gal, or someone might even assert that it’s personal — that you don’t like them [3].  A clever employee might even try to turn you into their personal proof-reader, knowing you’ll backstop their mistakes [4].

But, know this — your best employees will understand exactly what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.   And they will respond in kind:  first, they’ll change their processes to avoid breaking any of the established norms and second, they’ll reinforce those norms with their teams and peers.

# # #

Notes

[1] And people who do unacceptable things don’t last long in this organization.

[2] No one would ever say “the ambiance was great, the service prompt, and the customer should have been happy despite the raw scallops,” but somehow many business people will say “the vision was great, the idea creative, and that the CEO should have been happy despite all the typos and math errors.”

[3] Ergo be careful in your approach.  Feedback should always be about the work — criticize the performance, not the performer.  And you must be consistent about enforcing norms equally across all people.  (Norms aren’t just for the ones you don’t like.)  Proof-read only the first page or two of a document and then say, “continued review, but stopped proof-reading here.”  Or, borrowing from The Best Work Parable, you might just stop everything at page two, send the document back, and offer to read only a properly written version of it.

[4] This begs fundamental questions about approvals.  Say you approve a press release about last quarter’s results and it contains both several typos and several incorrect numbers.  Does your approval let people off the hook for those errors?  How will they see it?  What does your approval actually mean?  Are you approving every number and every comma?  Or are you, in effect, approving the release of the headline on a given date and assuming others are accountable for quality of the body?

8 Comments

Posted in Culture, Leadership, Management, Uncategorized

Quota Over-assignment and Culture

Posted on January 23, 2018 | 11 comments

Here’s a great slide from the CFO Summit at Zuora’s 2017 annual flagship Subscribed event.

underassign

Since they talk about this as under-assignment, since people aren’t great at flipping fractions in their head, and since I think of this more intuitively as over-assignment, I’m going to invert this and turn it into a pie chart.

quota over

So, here you can  see that 22% of companies have 0-11% over-assignment of quota, 44% have 11-25% over-assignment, 23% have 25-43%, 5% have 43-100% over-assignment, and 7% have more than 100% over-assignment of quota.

Since this is a pretty broad distribution — and since this has a real impact on culture, I thought examine this on two different angles:  the amount of total cushion and where that cushion lives.

The 0-11% crowd either has a very predictable business model or likes to live dangerously.  Since there’s not that much cushion to go around, it’s not that interesting to discuss who has it.  I hope these companies have adequately modeled sales turnover and its effects on quota capacity.

The 11-25% crowd strikes me as reasonable.  In my experience, most enterprise software companies run in the 20% range, so they assign 120 units of quota at the salesrep level for an operating plan that requires 100 units of sales.  Then the question is who has the cushion?  Let’s look at three companies.

cushion

In company 1, the CEO and VP of Sales are both tied to the same number (i.e., the CEO has no cushion if the VP of Sales misses) and the VP of Sales takes all of the cushion, giving the sales managers none.  In company 2, the CEO takes the entire 20% cushion for him/herself, leaving none for either the VP of Sales or the sales managers.  In company 3, the cushion is shared with the CEO and VP of Sales each taking a slice, leaving nearly half for the sales managers.

While many might be drawn to company 3, personally, I think the best answer is yet another scenario where the CEO and VP of Sales are both tied to 100, the sales managers to 110, and the aggregate salesrep quota to 120.  Unless the CEO has multiple quota-carrying direct reports, it’s hard to give the VP of Sales a higher quota than him/herself, so they should tie themselves together and share the 10% cushion from the sales managers who in turn have ~10% cushion relative to their teams.

I think this level of cushion works well if you’re building it atop a productivity model that assumes a normal degree of sales turnover (and ramp resets) and are thus using over-assignment simply to handle non-attainment, and not also sales turnover.  If you are using over-assignment to handle both, then a higher level of cushion may be needed, which is probably why 22% of companies have 25-43% over-assignment in their sales model.

The shock is the 12% that together have more than 43% over-assignment.  Let’s ponder for a minute what that might look like in an example with 60% over-assignment.

company4

So think about this for a minute.  The VP of Sales can be at 83% of quota, the sales managers on average can be at 71% of quota, and the salesreps can be at 63% of their quota — and the CEO will still be on plan.  The only people hitting their number, making their on-target earnings (OTE), and drinking champagne at the end of the quarter are the CEO and CFO.  (And they better drink it in a closet.)

That’s why I believe cushion isn’t just a math problem.  It’s a cultural issue.  Do you want a “let them eat cake” or a “we’re all in this together” culture.  The answer to that question should help determine how much cushion you have and where it lives.

11 Comments

Posted in Culture, Management, Sales

10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Moving into Management

Posted on March 6, 2017 | 8 comments

I went looking for a post to help someone decide if they should move into management, but couldn’t find one that I really loved.  These three posts aren’t bad.  Nor is this HBR article.  But since I couldn’t find a post that I thought nails the spirit of the question, I thought I’d write one myself.

So here are the ten questions you should consider before making a move into management.

 1. Do you genuinely care about people?  

Far and away this is the most important question because management is all about people.  If you don’t enjoy working with people, if you don’t enjoy helping people, or if you’d prefer to be left alone to work on tasks or projects, then do not go into management.  If you do not genuinely care about people, then do not go into management.

2. Are you organized?

While a small number of organizational leaders and founders can get away with being unstructured and disorganized, the rest of us in management need to be organized.  If you are naturally disorganized, management will be hard for you — and the people who work for you — because your job is to make the plan and coordinate work on it.

This is why one of my managment interview questions is:  “if I opened up your kitchen cabinets what would I see?”

3.  Are you willing to continuously overcommunicate?

In a world filled with information pollution, constant distractions, and employees who think that they can pay continuous partial attention, you’d be amazed how clearly you need to state things and how often you need to repeat them in order to minimize confusion.  A big part of management is communication, so if you don’t like communicating, aren’t good at it, or don’t relish the idea of deliberately and continuously overcommunicating, then don’t go into management.

4.  Can you say “No” when you need to do?

Everybody loves yes-people managers except, of course, the people who work for them.  While saying yes to the boss and internal customers feels good, you will run your team ragged if you lack the backbone to say no when you need to.  If you can’t say no to a bad idea or offer up reprioritization options when the team is red-lining, then don’t go into management.  Saying no is an important part of the job.

5. Are you conflict averse?

Several decades I read the book Tough-Minded Management:  A Guide for Managers Too Nice for Their Own Good, and it taught me the importance of toughness in management.  Management is a tough job.  You need to layout objectives and hold people accountable for achieving them.  You need to hold peers accountable for delivering on dependencies.  You need to give people feedback that they may not want to hear.  If you’re conflict averse and loathe the idea of doing these things, don’t go into management.  Sadly, conflict averse managers actually generate far more conflict than then non-conflict-averse peers.

6. Do you care more about being liked than being effective?

If you are someone who desperately needs to be liked, then don’t go into management.  Managers need to focus on effectiveness.  The best way to be liked in management is to not care about being liked.  Employees want to be on a winning team that is managed fairly and drives results.  Focus on that and your team will like you.  If you focus on being liked and want to be everyone’s buddy, you will fail as both buddy and manager.

7. Are you willing to let go?  

Everybody knows a micromanager who can’t let go.  Nobody likes working for one.  Good managers aim to specify what needs to be done without detailing precisely how to do it.  Bad managers either over-specify or simply jump in and do it themselves.  This causes two problems:  they anger the employee whose job it was to perform the task and they abdicate their responsibility to manage the team.  If the manager’s doing the employee’s job then whose doing the manager’s?  All too often, no one.

8.  Do you have thick skin?

Managers make mistakes and managers get criticized.  If you can’t handle either, then don’t go into management.  Put differently, how many times in your career have your run into your boss’s office and said, “I just want to thank you for the wonderful job you do managing me.”  For me, that answer is zero.  (I have,  however, years later thanked past managers for putting up with my flaws.)

People generally don’t complement their managers; they criticize them.  You probably have criticized most of yours.  Don’t expect things to be any different once you become the manager.

9.  Do you enjoy teaching and coaching?

A huge positive of management is the joy you get from helping people develop their skills and advance in their careers.  That joy results from your investment in them with teaching and coaching.  Great employees want to be mentored.  If you don’t enjoy teaching and coaching, you’ll be cheating your employees out of learning opportunities and cheating yourself out of a valuable part of the management experience.

10.  Are you willing to lead?

Managers need not just to manage, but to lead.  If stepping up, definining a plan, proposing a solution, or taking an unpopular position scares you, well, part of that is normal, but if you’re not willing to do it anyway, then don’t go into management.  Management requires the courage to lead.  Remember the Peter Drucker quote that differentiates leadership and management.

“Management is doing things right, leadership is doing the right things.”

As a good manager, you’ll need to do both.

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Posted in Culture, Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Management, Startups

Tagged

Six Words That Can Make or Break Your Credibility: “I’ll Get It To You Tomorrow”

Posted on October 11, 2015 | 4 comments

I can’t tell you the number of times people I’ve worked with over the years have said, “I’ll get it to you tomorrow,” and then don’t.  Sometimes they take a few extra days.  Sometimes, amazingly, they don’t get it to me at all.

Maybe I’m the problem.  Maybe I’m one of a rare breed who thinks that tomorrow is a date and not a euphemism for “later” — which itself is all too often a euphemism for “never.”

But I do notice and I think other people do, too.  In fact, probably the first and simplest sign that someone is in over their head is failing to hit tomorrow promises.  Heck, if you can’t accurately say at 2 PM that you’ll get something done before the end of the day, how I can expect any accuracy on your estimates of a major project?

I’m not so anal that I track every interaction with people.  But once I feel like a may have a “tomorrow” problem, I do start tracking.  I’ll randomly file promises for tomorrow under my tomorrow tasks and for next week under my next week tasks.

When I see problems, I usually start our snarky:  “somebody tell Garth that tomorrow never came.”  Or, “hey Scarlet, are you going to get to that again tomorrow, which is another day.”  Or, “yo, Annie, did the Sun come out yet because it is indeed tomorrow?”  There is just too much great tomorrow-themed material to resist. “Say hi to George Clooney there in Tomorrowland.”

But unfortunately when you’re in this situation, it’s usually not funny.  We can apply the same logic to broken promises as Malcolm Gladwell applies to broken windows:  one the first one breaks, a bunch quickly follow.

So the moral of the story is simple.  If you want to work in a culture of professionalism and proper expectations management, at a company that properly under-promises and over-delivers to its customers, then it all begins with you and the simple tomorrow promise.  Don’t make it if you can’t deliver, and once you make it, deliver. If you find that you can’t, then reset expectations accordingly — but never, ever promise “tomorrow” and then go silent.

Just as you’d be shocked at how many don’t answer questions in business meetings, you’d be shocked at the number of times people say tomorrow and mean “later” — once you start paying attention.

4 Comments

Posted in Culture, Management

To Pre-Meet Or Not To Pre-Meet: That Is The Question

Posted on March 24, 2014 | 9 comments

I once asked one of my board members which CEO ran the best board meetings across his portfolio companies.  His answer was, let’s call him, Jack.  Here’s what he said about him:

  • Jack got the board deck out 3-4 days in advance of the board meeting
  • Jack would call him — and every other board member — 2-3 days before each board meeting and walk through the entire deck and answer questions, taking maybe 2 hours to do so.
  • Board meetings with Jack would go very quickly and smoothly because all the questions had been asked in advance.

When I heard this, I thought, well, I have a few issues with Jack:

  • He spends a lot of time managing his board instead of running his business.  (I guess he got his CEO job by managing-up.)
  • He completely violates my “do it in the meeting” principle by having a series of pre-meetings before the actual meeting.

While I may have my doubts about Jack, others don’t seem to.  Consider entrepreneur and VC Mark Suster’s recent post, Why You Shouldn’t Decide Anything Important at Your Board Meetings.  Suster straight out recommends a 30 minute pre-meeting per board member.  Why?

  • Agenda input so you can adhere to the Golden Rule of Board Meetings:  “no surprises.”
  • So you can “count votes” in advance as know where people stand on important and/or controversial issues.
  • So you can use board members to convince each other of desired decisions.
  • Ultimately, because in his opinion, a board meeting is where you ratify decisions that are already pre-debated.

OK, I need to chew on this because, while practical, it violates every principle of how I think companies should conduct meetings — operational ones, at least.  When it comes to operational meetings, nothing makes me grumpier than:

  • Pre-meeting lobbying
  • Post-meeting “pocket vetoes”

My whole philosophy is that meetings should be the place where we debate things and make decisions.  Doing everything in advance defeats the purpose of meeting and risks encouraging political behavior (e.g., “if you vote for my bridge in Alaska, I’ll vote for your dam in Kentucky”), with managers horse-trading instead of voting for ideas based on their merits.

The only thing worse that teeing up everything in advance is what one old boss called the “pocket veto,” where a manager sits in a meeting, watches a decision get made, says nothing, and then goes to the CEO after the meeting and says something akin to “well, I didn’t feel comfortable saying this in the meeting, but based on point-I-was-uncomfortable-raising, I disagree strongly with the decision we reached.”

I remember this happened at Business Objects once and I thought:  “wait a minute, we’ve flown 15 people from around the world (in business class) to meet at this splendid hotel for 3 days — costing maybe literally $100,000 — and the group talked for two hours about a controversial decision, came to resolution, and made a decision only to have that decision overruled the next day.”  It made me wonder why we bothered to meet at all.

But I learned an important lesson.  Ever since then, I flat refuse to overrule decisions made in a meeting based on a pocket veto.  Whenever someone comes to me and says, “well, I didn’t feel comfortable bringing it up in the meeting (for some typically very good sounding reason about embarrassing someone or such), but based upon Thing-X, I think we need to reverse that decision,” I say one thing and only one thing in response:  “well, I guess you should have brought that up in the meeting.”

You see, I believe, based on a bevy of research, that functional groups of smart people make better decisions than even the smartest individuals.  So my job as CEO is to then assure three things:

But I’ve got a problem here because while we know that boards like pre-meetings, operationally I am opposed to both pre- and post-meetings.  Would it hypocritical for to say that pre-meetings are OK for me to conduct with the board, but that managers internally should avoid them?

Maybe.  But that’s what I’m going to say.   How can I sleep at night?  Because I think we need to differentiate between meetings with a decision maker  and meetings of a decision-making body.

Most people might think that the pricing committee, product strategy committee, or new product launch committee are democratic bodies, but they aren’t.  In reality, these are meetings with a decision maker present (e.g., the CEO, the SVP of products) and thus the committee is, perhaps subtly, an advisory group as opposed to a decision-making body.  In such meetings, the decision-maker should want to encourage vociferous debate, seek to prevent pre-meetings and horse-trading, and eliminate pocket vetoes because he/she wants to hear proposals debated clearly and completely based on the merits in order to arrive at the best decision.

However, board meetings are different.  Boards truly are a decision-making bodies ruled by one-person, one-vote.  Thus, while I reject Suster’s advice when it comes to conducting operational meetings (which I believe are inherently advisory groups), I agree with it when it comes to decision-making bodies.  In such cases, someone needs to know who stands where on what.

And that person needs to be the CEO.

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Posted in Boards, Culture, Management, Startups