organizational culture – Talent Revolution

Another thought on listening

I wrote about listening a few days ago. Then yesterday, I came across this paper by way of HBR. The paper studies psychological safety and its correlation to how teams learn and adapt. Unsurprisingly, the study finds many positive correlations between psychological safety and team performance. I list a few below.

Direct relationship with performance. Team psychological safety was positively associated with team learning behavior (seeking feedback, discussing errors, experimenting, adapting, improving).
Reduced friction caused by power and team dynamics. Teams with higher psychological safety give back greater returns to their employers in the form of learning, adaptation, output, and feedback to upward feedback.
Teams that are high in “team learning behavior” have high psychological safety and perform better… in fact, it reshapes our earlier thoughts on efficiency.
Team efficiency may be less important for helping teams learn than we thought. Psychological safety may be the friction reducing mechanism that enables more learning and productivity.

You saw the concept “team learning behavior” a few times. The concept describes how a team works. Seeking feedback, continuous improvement, and shipping work are all hallmarks of high performing teams and teams high in “team learning behavior.” It just happens to follow that teams that demonstrate high team learning behavior also are more likely to be high in psychological safety.

One Useful Thing

As a savvy leader, the best thing you can do is create space and time to get better at interpersonal communication.

Listen more and better.
Wait a beat before decision.
Ask more “what if” and “how might we” and “ooh, that’s interesting, how did that…” style questions.

These behaviors act as signals that communicate your desire for more openness. When your team perceives openness, they’ll begin feeling confidence to be more generative. Generative teams ship work. You only grow if you ship.

I hope I’ve shown that three simple behaviors above can start you on a path to increasing team learning behavior and improving the psychological safety of your team.

Overthinking collaboration

I have a theory that leaders overthink how to create highly collaborative and productive teams. This article from the Harvard Business Review recommends the new rules include a culture statement, a way to measure performance, and continuous improvement systems. What’s novel? And why is there demand for this knowledge?

I respect HBR’s work, and I value that they’re serving a need. Thank you, HBR. And I believe their output is not new, it’s what we do everyday — culture.

Let’s consider culture a system of transmitted behaviors, norms, values, and status markers that shape our society or organizations. It’s everything we see and can’t see. The system, like any organism, evolves in adaptive and maladaptive ways.

If that definition is true, here are my reasons for why we’re overthinking teams.

Life Finds a Way

Critique: Large teams are composed of people likely organized in sub teams. When people are organized together to create work outputs, they’ll create a system of behaviors, norms, values, and status markers that help them create valuable outputs — Robin Hanson calls these developments “cultural gadgets“.

Alternative: Allow sub cultures to form and thrive. Great work cultures can have contagion effects. Enjoy that. In fact, go out of your way to share subcultural practices with other teams so that they can be adopted. You’re creating your own internal and mini culture market.

Robustness vs Performance

Critique: Establishing key performance indicators is critical. No disagreement. However, as initiatives change your team will need to adapt. You’ll want robust culture systems that evolve to meet the shifting demands and pressures.

Alternative: Employ real time performance management dashboards (recommended by the article) and track how well the team adapts to changing priorities. Keep a history of all of the changing demands your team evolved to meet, productivity levels during those changes, and challenges you all overcame along the way. Share that story with your team constantly!

Maximize for Bottom Up

Critique: It’s common to hear that culture starts at the top. I disagree. I believe, based on my experience, that the inverse is true. Organizational culture statements are often feel good statements defining “who we are”; however, those statements aren’t a system — they’re words. Platitudes ≠ outputs.

Alternative: Allow your cultures to pop up and grow. In fact, allow for cultural drift — the process of a culture system evolving and adapting to new demands. As leaders, create selection pressures that favor more effective team cultures — celebrate the groups (collectively) that are making the most valuable outputs. And be wary of rigid company-wide policies that may stifle cultural evolution.

Do My Ideas Work and Scale?

Yes. My ideas are not novel. Scrum teams and creative groups operate in similar ways. The teams I build need to be high executing and creative problem solvers — adopting ideas from software and collaborative arts makes sense.

Scaling is both easy and hard. It’s easy to allow cultures to form. As a leader, it’s hard to let go. I am comfortable letting go and allowing culture to form. It’s my experience that people want to feel trusted, and when they do, they create good work. Your mileage may vary.

Potential Downsides

My ideas may not be suitable for teams that need to run a certain way to be successful. More rigid teams or organizations may find my ideas too radical — and that’s okay. As a leader, you need to assess your own culture and determine what’s best.

Wrapping it Up

This blog is for people who are obsessed about talent — spotting it, cultivating it, retaining it, and successfully exiting it into better roles internally or externally. If you’re going to be that person, it’s critical that you create environments for talent to do their best work. That means, creating space for micro cultures to take root, evolve, and adapt.

Being a bad hang; never a good thing.

I’ve been on teams where senior leaders ask me: “David, how do we get people to engage more” or “How, we do we get people to complain more?” Leaders want to create open environments for new ideas to make things better. Sadly, these very same leaders engage in behavior that makes them bad hangs.

Professional musicians sometimes categorize other musicians as “good hangs” or “bad hangs.” People who are considered “bad hangs” rarely get called, “good hangs” always get called. To “hang” well is to engage in behavior that makes someone want to spend time with you.

Showing up on time and sober.
Being kind.
Active listener.
Plays well with others.
Shares.
Show up prepared.

That’s it.

And in the corporate world, why should a hang be any different?

Managers that show up on time, demonstrate kindness, listen well, engage well with others, share their time and space, and show up ready are people that anybody would want to collaborate with — they’re a good hang.

In most cases where a senior leader asks for more open conversation, the challenge has been that the leader doesn’t listen well, doesn’t share the space, and talks over people — they appear impatient. And when teams begin to think that they are causing someone to become impatient, they quickly learn to shut up. Generativeness dies on the vine. Good talent starts looking for other managers.

One Useful Action

Focus on listening. Here’s how to practice the behavior:

(In your off time) learn to play an instrument. I’m not joking. Learning an instrument requires slow and painful repetition and critical listening skills. In addition, you’ll get a fun hobby out of it too!
When a direct report comes to you with an idea, ask a few questions before outputting a decision. Questions could be: What are the ramifications of this idea? What are the implications? What roadblocks do you expect and how might I help clear them? How might I help?
Don’t give the answer. Leave the question/idea with your team member and encourage them to work on it.

Parting Thought

If the returns from the talent you lead matter, the upfront cost of learning to be a good hang — in this case, listening — is worth every effort.

10 Questions You Can Ask Talent Before They Decide to Job Hunt

Since 2015, there’s an increase in poaching vacancies — vacancies intended for employed workers. By implication, firms are becoming more competitive by poaching top talent from their competitors. That insight comes from a working paper by Anton Cheremukhin and Paulina Restrepo-Echavarria. I write about the topic here.

Good firms conduct exit interviews when talent leaves. Admired Leadership via their blog, Field Notes, posted 10 Exit Interview Questions admired leaders ask. “Exit interviews are a best practice for an important reason. The best leaders want to know why people really left and what they can possibly do about it.” I think differently.

Customer success managers (CSMs) obsess over why and how customers make decisions. Decisions to adopt an innovation grow, or churn out. They seek to understand when customers make buying decisions and they seek to understand the factors that go into that decision-making process. The goal is to feed insights back via cross-functional channels and help the organization become more intelligent about their customers. Ideally, customer-centric organizations adapt to meet the needs of their customers and growth occurs. Worst case, customers churn. Just like employees.

Skilled managers, like you, are wise to think like a CSM when it comes to retaining their top talent. What if we took the 10 Exit Interview Questions offered by Admired Leadership and reframe them the way we might use them in customer success? They are:

How does the job deliver on your expectations? Are the challenges and growth you expected before starting here being realized?
Is it your intent to start thinking about your next opportunity soon?
What do you like most and least about the work now?
I would love your thoughts. Am I investing in you and supporting your success? How might I be more supportive?
How do you rate the quality of the recognition you receive for your work and contributions?
What makes it difficult to be productive? What gets in your way to achieve high performance?
If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about our team culture, what would you change and why?
How about the organizational culture? What might you change if you could change one thing?
If we hire in the future, would you recommend a job on our team to a friend or former colleague? Why or why not?
What do you think we need to do to retain our best talent?

Conducting an interview of this kind with an employee is courageous — for you and the employee. Your questions may cause someone to start looking for a new job. You may only receive positive “everything is great” type responses. You may hear some hard truths. There could be other reactions. I’ve been there, here’s how you manage that.

Listen, and be open.
Actively listen – ask clarifying questions, rephrase what you heard, and ask for the employee to check how well you understood them.
Do not debate. Listen to learn.
Thank them for their time.
Commit to following up so that your employee believes their feedback mattered.

Ultimately, the quality of your answers may be a function of your ability to create open and trusting relationships with your team. It’s the same thing with your customers.

If you find that neither your customers nor your employees will be honest with you, you may have a deeper problem.

Teams goals outweighing personal KPIs?

Tyler Cowen’s August 17th Bloomberg column (Bloomberg) highlights a significant shift in how how talent is evaluated and rewarded in modern organizations.

The Question

If the output to be created is a result of team-based functions, how do you determine who to put on the team and how to compensate that person for their inputs?

The Problem

Giving credit where credit is due. Who owns the largest % of meaningful contribution? How does that get measured?
The use of AI. How much was AI leveraged? Do you compensate people for improving the AI database? To reward or not reward for effective prompt engineering?
How do we find the right people to work on the team? Tyler notices that firms are starting to focus on ex ante signals of quality (a degree, signals of status, etc.) vs taking a chance on outsiders that may prove more beneficial.

My Take

Talent Spotters/Hiring Managers: Get better at spotting talent! Talk with other leaders about how they assess and look for talent. Talk with highly talented contributors and learn about their work. Learn about other disciplines and imagine how talent from that discipline may help you in yours. I found that engineering and music professionals are fantastic customer success managers.
Managers: Depending on your business, it’s possible you’ll need to rethink your KPIs. Perhaps team-based KPI and comp plans are best when the ideal outputs are a result of team dynamics.
Talent: Realize that the signals you put up to indicate your availability will need to change. Networks will become more important for people who have and don’t have credentials.
Managers: How do you reward people who improve the use and adoption of AI in the firm? It’s not enough to suggest good prompts. How are people incentivized to use AI as an efficiency and problem solving partner?

One Useful Action

If nothing else, simply ask yourself: do I have the right talent in the right seats? And, how sure am I that I’m not missing out on undervalued talent?

Proportionality

Reasons to deploy intensity:

Create urgency.
Communicate importance.
Communicate gravity.

Reasons to deploy aggression:

….

And now for something completely different.

And remember, if you find yourself reaching for aggression in the zoom room, perhaps it’s time to reach for a glass of water instead. Or a pen. Or better yet, the door. After all, nothing says ‘I’m a visionary’ quite like strategically excusing yourself to stare at the water cooler.

H/T to Adam Frith via Rohan Rajiv from a Learning a Day

Leadership transitions

Charismatic and adored leaders develop a sense about them. The organizational culture reveres that leader. The leader is considered “legend”. High performing talent may have joined your firm simply because of that leader. Some people may believe that the company won’t last without that person.

At the point when that leader must leave, skilled managers recognize they’re at a critical decision point — how they communicate change.

The sub-optimal thing is for the exiting leader to announce their departure on an all hands and for the new leader to join the call and share the new plan forward. That move threatens the established culture and norms of the organization. As much as change may be needed, that is not the moment.

A more optimal strategy would be two steps.

Meeting 1: The exiting leader to share their departure with the team. Share their plans for the future — that gives the team the opportunity to feel hope for their beloved leader. And, use that as an opportunity for the team to share their memories of the leader. Perhaps give an award or a silly gift for the leader to remember the team. This milestone moment gives the team the opportunity to grieve together, separate, and prepare for what’s next.
Meeting 2: The new leader introduces themselves. They acknowledge the legacy the last leader left behind — they pay homage to the past. They share what they observe the team doing now that works. They share their plan to listen, get to know everyone, and in the future share what they learned and how they see things move forward.

What’s happened here?

Meeting 1 is for the team to collectively grieve and progress forward.
Meeting 2 is for the new leader to say they come in peace and promise to listen, thus assuaging concerns that the new leader will threaten the culture.

Why bother?

Because if you hope to seek the gains that result from hiring and cultivate great talent, you need to have an environment for talent to thrive and do its best work.

If you can’t do that, what are you doing then?

Optimizing employee recognition for the person, not the system

Many questions are asked about how to best recognize talent for their achievements. Questions like:

What are the best ways to recognize employees?
To incentivize or not to incentivize?
To shout out publicly or not?

Every person perceives the ROI of their work in a unique way. For some, it’s money. For others, it’s public recognition. Others may just want to build something other use. The list goes on.

Every organization develops channels to recognize employees. Perhaps it’s a public kudos board. Maybe it’s a company recognition program to award employees for their excellent performance — you see this with sales teams.

The challenge many managers face is: how do I find that happy medium between what a person needs and how my organization operates? Which channel do I optimize?

Principle: Find the equilibrium of personal and organizational culture, and if you have to choose, optimize for the personal.

Every person tells themselves a story about themselves. In that story, they want to be the hero. In that story, the way they become the hero is unique to them. Here’s how you discover that:

Ask: What’s important to you about work?
Ask: What do you want to say you accomplished here 3 years from now? What bullet points do you hope to write on your resume?
Ask: What would be the most cringe-inducing form of recognition you might receive?

You don’t have to ask those exact question — simply be curious about the employee and what matters to them. Listen carefully, make notes, and act in a way that optimizes for their preferences.