Focus on Your First 10 Systems, Not Just Your First 10 Hires — This Chief of Staff Shares His Playbook
Focus on Your First 10 Systems, Not Just Your First 10 Hires — This Chief of Staff Shares His Playbook
In his six years at HashiCorp, Kevin Fishner has strung together a unique set of startup experiences. He joined the cloud infrastructure automation company in 2014 as the first business hire, going on to spin up the sales, solutions engineering, account management, and marketing teams. Afterwards, he spent a few years building out the product management and education groups as VP of Product. But for the last year and a half, he’s had a different perch — as the Chief of Staff.
We’ve written about the Chief of Staff role before here on The Review, of course. This increasingly commonplace startup role typically involves making the CEO more effective, prioritizing precious time, optimizing workflows and perhaps driving strategic projects. But Fishner’s mandate has a slightly different focus.
“My responsibility is to treat the company like a product, where employees are the user. Like a product manager, I spend my days thinking about what we should build and improve on, owning the components that make the company's culture and productivity come to life,” says Fishner. “We do that by asking this question: What are the core systems that are the manifestation of the culture that we want to build? At HashiCorp, we’ve grown from a few hundred to over a thousand people, so the goal is to build scalable systems that enable employees to do their best work and contribute to the outcomes of the company. For us, that’s shaped up into three specific systems: strategic planning, knowledge management, and communications.”
In this exclusive interview, Fishner unpacks what that entails, putting HashiCorp’s operations under a microscope and open sourcing his best practices and templates. We found it to be a fascinating conversation, and we hope you agree. For starters, Fishner’s got the rare ability to flip between the philosophical and the practical — one minute he’s talking about how determinism influenced his thinking on company building, and then a few minutes later he’s walking us through the exact template HashiCorp uses in its highly-structured annual planning process.
But more broadly, we’ve found that the mechanics and tactical ins-and-outs of how companies operate are still underexplored topics in the startup world. Most company systems evolve organically, either hastily cobbled together as the speed of scale takes over, or neglected until they’re forlorn and rather inflexible. Here, Fishner makes a thoughtful case for why the systems side of company building should get more attention, digging into the nitty-gritty details of two specific systems — how the HashiCorp team sets and tracks progress toward goals, and makes decisions through writing.
Whether you’re eyeing a chief of staff role, or you’re a founder hoping to set the right foundation for your fledgling company, read on for a unique chance to dive seriously deep into how one company functions — and garner inspiration for your own startup systems.
WHY YOUR FIRST 10 SYSTEMS ARE CRUCIAL
So much startup advice comes down to one common element: Hiring the best people. Whether it’s Twitter threads about how the first 50 hires set the cultural tone, or blog posts recommending that a founder interview the first 100 employees, most pointers are about keeping an unwavering focus on the people who power startups.
“While I definitely agree that people are your most important asset, I’ve noticed that most content doesn't talk as much about the systems. What I don't come across as often is a read about how the systems that those first hires build are the manifestation of the culture,” says Fishner.
In his view, it’s not an either or — it’s both. “While early employees are of course a driving factor for the company culture, they’re only half the equation. The other half is the foundational systems,” he says. “The comparison I like to draw is the nature versus nurture debate. Both your genes and your memes are highly influential on your outcomes. Likewise, both your people and your systems are highly influential on your company's outcomes — but the system side doesn't get as much attention as it should.”
Care about your first 10 systems as much as you care about your first 10 hires.
Fishner expands on why he thinks systems deserve equal footing. “While early employees help set implicit norms, building systems early in a company's lifecycle sets explicit norms. How do decisions get made? How are meetings structured? How are goals set? These systems are much easier to build when the company is small, and very challenging to put into place as the company grows,” he says.
- Kevin Fishner, HashiCorp's Chief of Staff
This point is particularly resonant these days. “The shift to remote work shows us how tricky this can be. Most of the interpersonal interactions you have day-to-day are through Slack, email, Google Docs, and Zoom meetings. So it's very possible that for many employees, their only face-to-face human interaction for the day is through a meeting. If that meeting is good, then their day is good. If that meeting is bad, then their day is bad,” he says. In response, many companies are trying to encourage more writing and fewer meetings, but find it challenging to adopt this practice because it's not an existing explicit norm, Fishner says. “For an established company, implementing new systems takes top-down executive authority.”
Founders: The earlier you can understand what practices are important to you, the better. Turn those practices into systems as soon as you can.
Fishner’s conviction here surprisingly comes from his college days. “I studied philosophy. My thesis was on the impacts of subconscious advertising techniques. Theories of economics are built on the foundational belief that individuals are rational, well-informed and autonomous. But in practice, none of those things are true. For example, we’re far from autonomous — each person influences other people,” he says.
“In my reading and research for the thesis, I came to more of a determinist worldview that free will is overrated and our willpower is overstated. We're actually much more influenced by the environments that we're put in. These points are really well-made in ‘Atomic Habits.’ If you want to eat better or exercise, don't rely on your willpower. Instead, change some of your environmental influences that lead to those behaviors, such as having sugar in your house.”
Here’s where the connection to startups comes in. “The same is true in company building — instead of relying completely on the willpower and independence of all your employees, think about how to build better systems and create the environment where people can do their best work,” says Fishner.
He extends the philosophy parallel even further. “Elon Musk has a quote that gets repeated all the time, essentially saying that a company is nothing more than a collection of individuals working towards a common mission. And I think that misses the mark. It’s like the Ship of Theseus thought experiment,” says Fishner.
“Imagine you have a big wooden pirate ship and over 100 years, you replace each piece of wood. At the end of that process, is it still the same ship? There's no clear answer, but it’s instructive to think of a company similarly. Employees could come and go over the course of 30 years to the point where none of the same employees are there. Is it the same company?” he asks. “I would argue yes.”
A company is a collection of both its people and its systems. People can come and go over the years, but the systems they put in place and gradually refine over time become part of the company — and companies ultimately compete based on if those systems are strong or not.
In the sections that follow, Fishner walks us through two of his company’s systems and how the team continually sharpens them. Fair warning — systems aren’t easy to copy and paste. “Everything I'm going to discuss is very important for HashiCorp, but I wouldn't say they're generalizable principles. So hopefully you can take them and remix them with your own ideas, — they’re not an absolute truth.”
SYSTEM #1: OPERATING CADENCE — WHY SOURCES OF TRUTH AND RITUALS ARE KEY TO STRATEGIC PLANNING
What HashiCorp vernacular dubs “operating cadence,” other startups would likely call goal-setting or OKRs, says Fishner. “The operating cadence is the quiet drum beat setting our direction and the rhythm driving the business. At HashiCorp, our operating cadence has three speeds — annual, quarterly, and weekly,” he says. Each speed is built on two components:
Sources of truth: defines success in a clear, ideally quantifiable way.
Rituals: a consistent practice to review that source of truth and build accountability.
Before we dive into each element, check out this quick overview below of the example sources of truth and rituals HashiCorp relies on to make progress and stay accountable at the annual, quarterly and weekly levels:
“If you get it right, this system can set clear expectations, track performance, and identify improvements to make along the way,” says Fishner. Unfortunately, for too many startups, this process tends to go sideways. You’ve likely encountered this pattern before: A rapidly-growing startup team encounters confusion about priorities, a lack of alignment, and wasted efforts, so someone suggests the company implement a goal-setting framework. After a lengthy process of setting OKRs, the wheels slowly start to come off. “Oftentimes companies will focus on the source of truth and not the ritual — and that's one of the biggest mistakes that you can make,” says Fishner.
“After OKRs are set, there's no ritual for reviewing them, so they quickly get out of date. Then employees start resenting them because the effort to actually create the goals was a waste of time — and OKRs slowly die because no one looks at them anymore. Expectations aren’t enough. It’s the ritual that it keeps the priorities top of mind and folks focused on what's important.”
OKRs only work if there is a ritual of reviewing progress and holding owners accountable for hitting their goals.
Annual planning:
Source of truth: Company scorecard, organized around 3 executive focuses and broken down in 12 sub-scorecards. See HashiCorp's template here or get our Google Doc version here.
Ritual: Annual planning summit
Timeframe: Brainstorming in September, resource allocation in October, then individual executive planning ahead of coming together for annual planning summit December.
“The first step for us is actually more long-term than an annual planning process. We started by defining high-level company success metrics as our North Star goals. Look for big, ambitious goals that come from years of execution. They’re usually lagging indicators that are almost useless to track quarterly. For us, these are fixed goals that frame our annual operating plans, but they change in magnitude each year,” he says.
“At HashiCorp, our first long-term goal is to win the practitioner (measured as a monthly active user account). Second is to enable the customer (measured through ARR). Third is to grow the ecosystem (measured as a percentage of revenue attributed to our partners). Our finance team then took those North Star goals and built a long-range plan, which is a five-year financial model with derivative financial metrics.”
With that context in place, let’s turn to the annual scorecard. “Essentially, it’s our incarnation of OKRs. Using our scorecard template, we define objectives and a set of key results for each objective, tracking progress on a quarterly basis. These objectives are at the highest level of the company, setting the overall priorities for the upcoming year,” says Fishner. “They’re the leverage points that we as an executive team think will have the most positive impact on reaching that five-year long range plan.”
Source of truth: Scorecards
Here’s how the scorecard gets filled in: “There’s an executive offsite in September where we do a structured brainstorming around what the top three executive focuses should be for our company objectives,” says Fishner.
- HashiCorp's annual scorecard template.
But it’s not a run-of-the-mill brainstorm. “There's a few Harvard Business Review studies around brainstorming that show when you just bring people together and ask them to put stickies up on a wall, it doesn't work that well. So we give executives two weeks before the offsite to write down what they think the three focuses should be for the upcoming year,” he says. “Then, each exec gets five minutes at the meeting to talk through their suggestions. Then we put all the suggestions into a list — there's usually quite a bit of overlap so we end up with about 15. Each exec then ranks five initiatives, five being the most important, one being the least, and then we just do a sorted ranking from there.”
This process has a few benefits, Fishner says. “First, allowing everyone to think about the objectives independently means they won’t get stuck in group think. Second, folks can often be more thoughtful when there's not as much urgency to come up with ideas on the spot. And finally, each leader gets equal airtime and opportunity to have their voice heard.”
With those high-level executive focuses as a starting point, the team dives a layer deeper. “We break down our company objectives (level 100) into goals by four ‘plans’ (level 200) — a go-to-market plan, product plan, people plan, and finance plan. Then, the go-to-market plan is broken down by field geography (Americas, EMEA, APJ) and the product plan is broken down by product line,” says Fishner. All told, they end up with 12 different scorecards.
Interestingly, the “Level 200” plans are jointly owned. “Sales, marketing and customer success executives collaborate on our go-to-market scorecard, and product and eng executives work on our product scorecard. You don't often see that joint ownership in other goal frameworks, the thinking being that you want to have one directly responsible individual,” says Fishner. “But software isn’t something that can be broken down into very tiny constituent parts. It's not an assembly line.”
But that’s not an excuse to skimp on the details — hence the further breakdown by geography and product line. “It’s critical to properly segment company goals to surface insights. If goals are too high-level, over-performance in one product line hides the under-performance in another — which is well captured by Simpson's Paradox,” he says.
When you only look at high-level aggregate metrics, the nuance of what's really happening in your business gets lost.
But if goals are too low-level, the signal can get lost in the noise. “Importantly, we don't force our scorecards further down than the field geographies and the product lines. Take the Americas scorecard as an example,” says Fishner. “There’s about 150 sales, customer success, engineering, and field marketing folks dedicated to the Americas. Their scorecard focuses on metrics like top-line revenue, renewal rate, expansion rate, and then leading indicators like pipeline generation and coverage. As a leadership team, we don't try to cascade it down into individual regions like New York or Texas — that’s their responsibility.”
Ritual: Time to practice
“These draft executive scorecards get built from usually mid-October to December, which is when the annual planning summit is. We bring 70 senior leaders in the company together — this past year was remote of course, but we usually do it in person. It's two days, about four to five hours per day,” says Fishner.
What’s most unique is that the summit is focused on a business simulation. “Using a firm called BTS, we run a business simulation where leaders get to ‘run’ the business for three years. Taking a simplified view of the company, we essentially build a game board based on our five-year financial model and this year’s three executive focus areas,” says Fishner.
- A sample snapshot of the HashiCorp annual business simulation.
Here’s how it works: “We break folks up into teams of six, and they get to be the ‘CEO’ or the executive team for two days. Each round, your team gets to determine what initiatives to invest in. But there are ‘wobblers’ in the game, which are events that come up to throw you off track so you have to make a decision about how to adjust. It deepens our leaders’ understanding of not only what the priorities are for the year, but how they might play out in ‘practice.’”
Of course, this is a complex undertaking suited for bigger teams, so it may not work for your startup. “The essence of this exercise is the notion of practice. I grew up playing competitive soccer. We practiced four or five times a week and had games on the weekend — basically spending 90% of the time practicing and 10% of the time actually having to perform,” he says. “But when you get into a work environment, that notion of practice gets lost. So the simulation is about creating room for practice and making mistakes.” (Editor’s note: This excellent point from Fishner reminded us of Tyler Cowan’s question: What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?)
To bring that spirit to your company in a more simplified version, Fishner suggests more lightweight options. “Bring a smaller group of leaders together for an offsite. Create an exercise where you're sitting in someone else's shoes and going through one of their day-to-day activities, such as answering support tickets,” he says.
A setting for practice, making mistakes, and building up empathy for what other people are going through is key to any annual ritual.
Quarterly progress:
Source of truth: Scorecard and WAR tables.
Ritual: Quarterly business review (QBR)
Timeframe: 12 30-minute QBRs dedicated to reviewing each scorecard The audience is the executive team (all CEO direct reports) and extended leadership team (all VPs ), about 30 people.
With the annual plan fixed, the HashiCorp team turns their attention to their quarterly cadence. “Every quarter we review progress on all 12 scorecards in QBRs. The scorecards from the annual process get updated, filling in the columns with the previous quarter’s results. As an additional source of truth, there are Wins, Action Items, and Requests for Support (WAR) tables,” says Fishner. “The leaders review progress on the scorecard itself, read the team’s reflections and then discuss areas that might need improvement.”
Here’s what the WAR tables cover: “The team filling out the updates reflects on these questions: What are the wins? What are the great accomplishments that we should celebrate and keep moving forward on? What are the challenges and the action items? As an example, for one of our product lines, the activation rate — monthly active users divided by the signups — was low in a recent quarter,” he says.
- HashiCorp's WAR table template.
Here are two benefits Fishner sees from this approach:
Reflection: “One of our principles is reflection not perfection. Goal setting is a process of reflecting on progress, not trying to get your goals so perfect upfront that you never need to change them. They're either off in terms of magnitude or completely misguided,” he says. “The QBRs create the space to reflect. Are we on track to hit goals? Are these the right goals? What can we do to improve?”
Accountability: “As chief of staff, I don’t have the authority or the time to hold owners effectively accountable for their goals. The ritual is what creates accountability — the owners of the scorecards know that every quarter they will review their progress to the executive team and they will also review what they said they would accomplish last quarter,” he says.
The purpose of an operating cadence isn't to dogmatically stick to goals set at the beginning of the year. It's a ritual of reflection and introspection.
Weekly review:
Source of truth: Corporate reporting pack.
Ritual: Exec team meeting
Timeframe: One-hour meetings on Mondays, broken up into four 15-minute time slots
Now for the most granular level of HashiCorp’s operating cadence. “The corporate reporting pack is a superset of the metrics in the scorecards we review quarterly,” says Fishner. “It tracks everything from our current quarter sales forecast to our progress toward our hiring goals. It's an attempt to get as close as possible to a company cockpit where we can see leading and lagging indicators and know if the company is flying effectively.”
Fishner, along with a cross-functional group of sales operations, finance, and go-to-market folks, compiles this set of metrics every week. “The cross-functional element is important here. Take a question like ‘What is our sales forecast?’ Oftentimes the finance team and the sales team have different views on that,” he says. “After reviewing the metrics, we pull out insights — areas that are trending red that we need to take action on.”
Now for the weekly ritual. “It’s a more fine grain review of what's important for the company and how we're progressing. The exec team reviews the corporate reporting pack every Monday in a weekly hour-long meeting. For the first 15 minutes, we review the insights on the metrics. For the other three 15-minute slots, a guest speaker comes in to present on an action item that we identified in the previous QBR — another level of accountability to make sure that we’re following up on the challenges that we surfaced.”
Here’s the thinking behind this fine-tooth comb approach:
Focus on leading indicators. A quarterly look just isn’t enough. “It's hard to change renewal performance in the current quarter. A renewal happens or doesn't happen based on the past year of customer experience with our products and services. We need to track leading indicators that create a strong renewal rate — customer onboarding, account health, and implementation services usage,” says Fishner. “For every lagging indicator, we need to have a set of leading indicators that we review on a weekly basis.”
Focus on what matters. “The science of it is making sure your weekly reporting pack is truly representative of the most important metrics of the company,” says Fishner. “This level of weekly scrutiny keeps us on track to deliver our high-leverage actions — instead of getting distracted by the flow of urgent, low-leverage escalations. If a different leading indicator is acting up, there’s an impulse to take action on it. But if it’s not on the annual scorecard, then earlier in the year we agreed that we don't think that's very important for the health of the company — so it doesn't need to be something we focus on.”
Your rituals should keep you focused on what you decided was important earlier in the year — not on this week’s shiny distraction.
SYSTEM #2: HOW TO FORGE A COMPANY CULTURE OF WRITING AND DECISION DOCUMENTATION
“HashiCorp is a remote company with employees in 13 countries and 40 states. But I like to take one step back and describe us as an open source company,” says Fishner. “It’s a subtle difference, but an interesting one, especially with our company culture of writing. When you're working on open source software projects, there's a ton of written collaboration on GitHub. The origin of our writing practice comes from that open source ethos, as well as the philosophy and principles of the early employees,” he says.
“When Mitchell Hashimoto — the company’s co-founder and namesake — was in college, he would take a notebook with him everywhere. And whenever he had ideas for software projects, he was really diligent about writing them down first. So when he and his co-founder Armon Dadgar started working together, they would create thorough design documents and documentation before writing a single line of code,” says Fishner. “It was specifically on the engineering side at first, but something like 45 out of the first 50 employees were engineers, so that idea of writing the design before implementation became a core part of the company.”
For HashiCorp, their habit of writing is a way to document decisions and get buy-in before moving into implementation. Here’s how it works in practice. “We have two core documents. There’s a PRD, which in most companies is a product requirement document, but we've tweaked it a little bit to be a problem requirement document. It defines the problem. The second is the RFC, or request for comment. It proposes a solution or design, the implementation you want to get approval on before you start,” says Fishner.
We dive into each one below:
Defining the problem
See HashiCorp's PRD template here or grab our Google Doc version:
“Most large projects start with a PRD and are followed by an RFC, but not every RFC will have a PRD. The product management team definitely writes a lot of PRDs,” says Fishner. “But more generally, we’ve found that for some of the more ambiguous challenges we're facing — especially where there are many stakeholders — it's helpful to write a PRD first to make sure everybody's in agreement on the problem we’re actually solving.”
As for the document itself, these are the core sections:
Background context. “In order for a reader to understand the content of the PRD, they must first understand the context.”
Problem and personas. “This is the heart of the PRD as it simplifies the user research into clear problem statements. It also includes a list of personas and how they experience those problems statements.”
Requirements and phases. “This is more of the traditional product management PRD that you would expect, with a list of requirements that the engineering RFC should satisfy. The problem is also broken down into phases to enable iterative implementation.”
The most important component? Your mindset while putting it together. “While the introduction section is read first, it should be authored last. Writing the overview last allows the author to summarize the final content of the PRD, rather than write an introduction without knowing the end result.”
Writing a PRD is about curating information, not creating it; you should go into the process without preconceived notions of what you’ll find.
Scoping the solution
See HashiCorp's RFC template here or grab our Google Doc version
“The guiding principle that we use for whether or not you should write an RFC or not is if the time it takes to make the change is faster than writing the document itself,” says Fishner.
“The RFC itself is really two core sections: the background, and then the proposal. The guiding goal of the background section is: as a newcomer to this project (new employee, team transfer), can I read the background section and follow any links to get the full context of why this change is necessary?” he says.
“In the proposal, there are a bunch of subsections for different aspects of the implementation, including impacts to UX and UI. The last piece is the constituents who approve and give feedback,” says Fishner. “But there's a third optional section called the abandoned ideas. We found that there were really good debates happening in the RFCs. Rather than only leaving what the outcome of those debates were, capturing those alternative ideas gives a more holistic picture and helps the reader understand what the writers were exploring.”
Fishner runs us through an example of an RFC in action outside of the engineering org. “The finance team writes lots of RFCs about what our expense system should be or how we should put together our long-range plan. The background section might explain the finance planning cycles. Then in the proposal itself, they might list considerations, such as arriving at our North Star metrics within 5 years, building a path towards EBITDA profitability, or setting the guard rails to not violate a magic number of one — the current year revenue divided by last year sales and marketing cost,” he says.
“From there they break down the exact components of the long-range plan: our income statement, cash flows, our non-GAAP ARR table, and so on. They then collect comments or feedback on that basic plan, and get it approved and implemented. Afterwards, you send your RFC to the company-wide email list. While most will just read the email rather than the full RFC, sending it to the list gives visibility into decisions being made across the company.”
Fishner shares more about the art of putting this document together. “Funnily enough, we do have a RFC for how to write RFCs, as well as an RFC template that everybody follows. We've learned a lot over the past six, seven years on these written documents, and there are good reasons for why the template is the way it is,” he says.
The process of getting feedback on RFCs is also critical. “First, it’s important to make sure that the solution is appropriate and takes in the necessary perspectives. But second, it's a cultural practice,” says Fishner. “Feedback on RFCs is one of the predominant ways we give feedback in the company. The first rule is to make sure that you're giving feedback on the document itself, not the person. That means changing the way you write the feedback. Instead of, ‘Why did you write this?’ say, ‘Why is this aspect of the solution the right way to go?’”
THREE PARTING PRINCIPLES FOR FELLOW CHIEFS OF STAFF
As a capstone, Fishner shares three lessons he’s learned from architecting these systems in his capacity as chief of staff. Draw on them as you size up your startup’s own potential systems.
Principle #1: Be an observer not doer.
“This was a good lesson learned when I just stepped into the chief of staff role. You get an interesting perspective on a company because you get the CEO's lens of how functions are operating and collaborating with each other. And it becomes really easy to spot problems, between sales and marketing, or sales and customer success. The pitfall is thinking that you can go and fix them. As the chief of staff, you could be responsible for proposing the solution — in our case, writing an RFC and building the source of truth — but you will never be responsible for the ritual. And the ritual is where change happens.”
He shares a specific example. “When I first stepped into the role 18 months ago, we had a discrepancy between the way that sales, marketing, and customer success were segmenting our users. They all had a slightly different model. I approached it with a ‘doer’ mindset. I thought if I just define a customer segmentation model, they'll all use it. And while we were able to get to a model that we all agreed on, because I wasn't in those seats, running those meetings and building the rituals, it was never adopted.”
As chief of staff, you can observe challenges, but you're not really the person to solve them.
Principle #2: Find and enact leverage.
“If there’s anything I've learned as a chief of staff, it’s that leverage is the most important thing you can find — by which I mean, finding the actions that you can take that have the most positive cascading impacts across the company,” says Fishner.
The purpose of leverage is to create as much change as possible with as little effort as possible. “An executive team has limited resources. Every quarter we need to ruthlessly prioritize our focus areas. As a chief of staff, you’re a supporting function to the executive team. It’s your job to make sure the executive team is aligned on the most impactful decisions that we can make as a group,” he says.
“When I first started working on the operating cadence, I kind of lost sight of that purpose. As I’ve done it more, I’ve seen that finding that leverage is about creating a system of observation where you can understand what's going on in different parts of the company. You can see where the soft spots are, and doggedly hold folks to fixing the spots that could have the most dramatic improvement on the company itself. And that's really what the operating cadence system is about. The system to define goals and track progress is a means to the end of finding high leverage actions.”
It’s not about OKRs or any other goal-setting acronyms. If the system doesn’t surface the highest leverage improvements to make, it’s not a productive system.
Principle #3: Sample inspiration, but make sure you remix it.
“I’ve done a good amount of research on other companies’ practices, and the ones that are most influential on us are Amazon and Microsoft. For example, the scorecards are definitely inspired by Microsoft. And while we didn’t copy Amazon’s practice of written memos exactly, it's good validation that it works and it can work at a very, very large scale,” says Fishner.
“But it’s important to remember that these systems are very much cultural artifacts. This has been really apparent to me as companies have been forced to adopt remote work over the past year. Whenever I’m asked for advice on remote practices, the one I lead with is always writing. I walk through a few of our RFCs and the process overall, and 99% of the time, the reaction is, ‘This is great, but it will never work at our company,” he says.
“And this is why it comes back to building systems. Early in the company life cycle, if you treat your core systems with just as much gravitas as your early employees, those systems will build the culture. That’s why the systems need to be organic to the company itself. You can take inspiration from other companies, but it's really just inspiration. You need to remix it with other ideas. Let go of the idea that you're creating new innovations, but rather see how you're creating unique combinations of existing ideas for that work for the specific setting of your company.”
This article is a lightly-edited summary of Kevin Fishner's appearance on our new podcast, "In Depth." If you haven't listened to our show yet, be sure to check it out here.
Cover image by Getty Images / Jorg Greuel. Templates courtesy of HashiCorp.
Related content
Early in your career, your ability to acquire technical knowledge and quickly demonstrate it is what made you a top performer.
But, as the old adage says (and I quote Marshall Goldsmith), “What got you here won’t get you there.” In other words, later in your career, moving fast and having all the answers is actually detrimental to your executive presence and your ability to motivate and engage others.
First, raise your hand if you identify with any of the following statements:
- I have a high capacity for work and move faster than those around me.
- I often know the right solution well before the team reaches the logical conclusion.
- My action bias is one of the reasons why I am so productive – it’s one of my best qualities.
- I know I need to pull others into the discussion, but I get frustrated when it slows down the process.
- I have a lot of ideas and solutions to problems that I tend to share quickly and often.
- I’ve been told that I get noticeably agitated or short when I feel things are not happening quickly enough.
- I feel as though I can help guide the team to the right answer when they get stuck.
And to take it one step further - sometimes best-laid intentions can be your greatest leadership derailers.
- “I want to be helpful.”
- “I want to move the conversation along.”
- “I need to get the team focused.”
- “I need to solve problems quickly.”
These moments can present a real crossroads in your professional development journey, and admitting you have a problem is the first step toward growth. When you recognize and harness restraint, create space for others, and shift the role you play in the discussion, suddenly the game changes.
How do you get there? Flip the script! Instead of coming up with solutions, push yourself to ask guiding questions. The most critical question: How can I help?
These four key words will help you turn the traditional top-down leadership approach on its head. Rather than jumping in with your own ideas or constructive feedback about why or why not an idea won’t work, asking how you can help opens the door for your team to speak up, learn, and grow. Holding this space for your team not only helps them to develop, but brings forth the new, unusual, and sometimes groundbreaking ideas that can transform your business. Imagine how your interactions, team decisions, leadership, and employee engagement will change if you begin asking instead of solutioning.
Case in point
A senior leader in the consumer goods industry was working on her executive presence. Her fast-paced style often left others feeling like they were constantly trying to catch up. She created the sense that she wasn’t open to others’ perspectives – even though that was quite the opposite of her intent.
Despite wanting to help the team move forward by providing solutions – in reality, she took up so much airtime that others felt there wasn’t room for them to introduce new ideas or debate. This leader needed to shift her approach. She needed to move from being a “problem solver” to a “solution facilitator.” How? By asking that simple question, “How can I help?”
When she started asking questions rather than offering solutions, she began putting some of the control back in the team’s hands. In doing so, she shifted the power dynamic within her team and leveled the playing field, allowing more diverse ideas to surface, which ultimately resulted in higher team engagement.
If you are a leader who quickly jumps in to solve problems, give this one small behavior shift a shot. Ask, How can I help? And then LISTEN. You might be surprised at what you get in return.
I work with senior leaders who spend a good portion of their time in meetings with other senior leaders.
You’d think that because these leaders are facing similar challenges, at similar levels, communicating and influencing would be somewhat effortless between them. After all, who understands the challenges of senior leaders better than another senior leader?
Therein lies the rub. It’s true that senior leaders share plenty in common with one another, including similar blind spots, which is why the same types of communications challenges often come up between them. Here are of the most common mistakes we see leaders make and how to rethink communicating with your colleagues at your next meeting.
Remember that you’re never there to just inform one another
Bringing a group of senior leaders together is an expensive proposition. It’s why if you’re asking your highest-paid people to meet, it should only be for a handful of reasons: To make a decision, agree on a path forward, address an urgent matter, debate an important idea, and so on. Bringing senior leaders together to simply inform one another, provide updates or discuss problems with no real resolution is low value for them and their organizations. If you want to inform, share a pre-read, or send along a dashboard link.
Focus on how to move from informing to action
To get at this, stop talking about what you’re working on and start shifting the conversation to produce more results to come out of the conversation. If you’re leading a discussion with other senior leaders, always decide what result you’re there to achieve ahead of time: A decision? Agreement on a plan of action? Alignment around a commitment? Then, determine how you’ll achieve the result in the time given. Don’t underestimate how much more impact and value you can immediately create with those two simple steps.
Own the fact that you are there to sell
Producing results is not a neutral activity, which is why if you’re leading a discussion with other senior executives, remember that you’re there to sell your colleagues on a course of action. Just because they are your peers doesn’t mean they want the same things—or that they are automatically on board with your agenda. It’s your job to persuade, to influence, to break through the noise and get this in-demand audience to care. Sharing compelling data and information may be a helpful starting point, but if you’re meeting with other senior leaders, those are table stakes. To win hearts and minds, do more to put your audience at the center and engage them on how your idea will help them win.
Make the audience the star of the movie
Think about your discussions with other senior leaders like movies, and if the star is you instead of them, you’ve lost the plot. To influence, help the audience see how they benefit in the future you’re describing. To do that, storytelling is key. Your executive peers can be the toughest audience a leader can face. It’s all the more important to paint a compelling picture of the future state. Describe the potential opportunity in realistic, credible terms, walk the audience through a path to achieving the future that feels doable. It may be tempting to boil the ocean or go heavy on the doom and gloom language (“we’re going to be out of business in five years if we don’t start now”), but a little goes a long way. Most of us don’t want to star in a depressing movie, so to influence, work on a compelling narrative that your audience wants to be part of.
Play to win
The biggest mistake I see senior executives make with one another in meetings? They play not to lose, instead of playing to win. In practice, this might look like keeping comments safe when sharing ideas, checking out or multitasking, keeping quiet, refusing to challenge each other in meetings, or not holding peers accountable to achieving results in discussions. The impact is that we miss the opportunity to have the types of high value, business-moving conversations that senior leaders can and should be having. To get at this, self-awareness is essential, and it may require you to do more to make sure your leadership voice can be heard. For many, this may require preparing differently, sharing ideas in a bolder way, or doing more to make sure the value of your ideas is obvious to the audience.
There may be no single action a company can take to improve its business more powerful than this: Enable your senior executive peers to engage in high value conversations with each other, more often, because when this happens, the benefits are far and wide. Decisions get made, alignment is strengthened, and that accelerates results for companies. Equally important, when senior executives show up differently for each other, they create new norms, elevate the culture, and set an even higher standard for performance.
This article was originally published in Sales & Marketing Management here.
It’s not enough to prepare for a sales call with general industry knowledge. Sellers need business acumen: a customer-specific grasp of business objectives and the metrics a customer uses to measure success.
Sellers need these insights in order to be agile in conversation and adjust their talking points as needed to address the motivations of different executives. That’s how they can position themselves — and the companies they work for — as true partners in success.
As it stands, only 20% of salespeople are prepared to offer any real value during a sales call. For sales leaders, it’s essential to develop their teams’ business acumen so that sellers are equipped to develop ongoing relationships with customers.
Customer-Centric Sales
Business acumen brings credibility. A seller who can range around in a conversation, listening for cues to shift to different business priorities and genuinely landing on the executive’s radar, will be invited back for further meetings.
This savvy also allows sellers to engage around the entire sales cycle and open up opportunities throughout. When sellers can see things from a customer’s perspective, they become trusted advisors.
Sales leaders can build their teams’ business acumen by facilitating the following steps:
1. Gather deep industry knowledge.
It’s not enough to have company-specific information; sellers need a working knowledge of their customers’ industries as well. It goes beyond “show me you know me” to being able to demonstrate exactly how a product or service will benefit a business — or, more to the point, the person seated across the table or fielding the call.
Sellers need to gather in-depth information about prospects and customers. Hit up social channels, read their 10-Ks, and keep up with industry press to know what’s going on right now: What are prospects’ recent struggles? Successes? Competitors? Customers they serve? What are the personas and demographics? All this information can provide context, allowing the seller to speak directly to prospects’ pain points and develop custom solutions for their businesses.
2. Develop the skills to secure a meeting.
Of all the skills to master as salespeople, getting introductions tops the list. In fact, 70% of customers value “connected processes” — contextualized engagements. Think of it as a seamless hand-off between a person in the seller’s network and a decision maker at a company.
Introductions entail more than the introduction itself. They also involve a strong point of view and the right questions to ask so that the customer executives open up about their businesses. It’s all about being relevant and bringing value to the conversation.
Related Post: 4 Ways to Help Your Salesforce Excel
3. Understand customers’ metrics.
Many salespeople enter the room with some understanding of a customer’s business challenges. Not as many come in with knowledge around the financials, initiatives, and KPIs used to measure success. Knowing how an executive will measure success lets a seller speak to those points specifically.
The seller must focus on the customer by offering assistance, following up regularly, and even helping to strategize next steps. The goal here is to ensure that the customers adopt the company’s products or services and see its business value. After all, their success will encourage additional purchases and a stream of revenue over time.
Related Post: How to Lead High Value Meetings with Senior Executives
4. Pair the offer with the value proposition.
Sellers need to have an offer that’s helpful or valuable. They need to know the products or services that will address the customer’s business challenges.
These discussions should carry over into training and enablement. One way to prepare sellers is through simulations, which let customer-facing teams immerse themselves in a customer’s challenges. Being on the inside of a business allows sellers to become more intuitive and develop custom solutions for current customers. And practice, whether with a seller’s manager or a professional coach, helps sellers to develop confidence in a safe environment.
Business acumen opens up the playing field for sellers, whether that’s through a new opportunity, greater customer success, or increased influence with a different executive within the customer’s business. Conversational agility and opportunity will give sellers the consultative skills that foster successful relationships.
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Leading with Purpose, Part 1
Most CEOs I speak with are not 100% at peace with their company’s purpose. As the market, their people and their business evolve, so will their purpose. As some of the best companies of past and present show us, there is strength, and even magic, in a great company purpose. What is also clear, however, is that this magic does not come from just having a “purpose” or “vision,” but rather from how well a company is executing against their purpose.
When Southwest Airlines (which has been profitable for 45 consecutive years, and on FORTUNE’s list of World’s Most Admired Companies for 24 straight years) was first starting out, their mission was to make flying affordable.1 They rallied their people on the idea that a grandmother should be able to affordably buy a ticket, at the drop of a hat, to get on a flight to see her new grandchild. This simple mission led to the “Southwest Effect,” which transformed the airline industry, and continued to be a lens with which the Southwest leadership team made key decisions.
Today, Southwest’s vision has evolved: “To become the world’s most loved, most flown, and most profitable airline.” And they are executing on this vision. They continue to drive superior shareholder returns against all industries on the S&P 500 (as they have for the past 44 years), and in 2018 were named the top low-cost airline in JD Powers customer survey reports for the second year in a row.
As the Southwest example highlights, great company purpose combined with a leadership team who will build the work-flows, culture, processes and metrics to live up to it can be an enormous employee motivator. But we have also experienced, both at BTS and with our global clients, that a good company vision and purpose on their own are not sufficient – employees need them to be even more personal to them as an individual. I remember a lunch I had twelve years ago with a 24-year old new hire who was my direct report. After some small talk he looked at me and said, “Why are you here? Why have you spent seven years with the same company?”
I’ll never forget that lunch. It was the first time I had been asked the question, and it was the beginning of a new decade where our employees were much louder and more active about wanting to reflect and spend time on our mission and purpose, linking it to their personal values and the impact they strived to have in the world. Luke, that 24-year old new hire, has made me and our company better as a result of his question.
In the last decade, there has been a growing emphasis in the business world on finding a deeper motivation to unlock greater meaning at work. For some this may sound ‘fluffy,’ or as one executive we spoke to commented, “Is this just the next version of the pursuit of vision and values? It sounds great on paper but too often makes little real difference as it tends to stay on the wall, rather than live in your heart.”
Yet your people spend the majority of their life at work and with colleagues. At its best, a sense of purpose is a way of bringing meaning to their work and understanding the contributions they are making to the company, as well as greater society. It makes sense, then, that employees who are clear on their personal and professional purpose end their work day invigorated and proud of what they’re doing instead of exhausted by mindless work that is bereft of real meaning.
According to a recent PWC study, 79% of business leaders believe that purpose is central to business success – but only 34% use their organization’s purpose as a guidepost for their leadership team’s decision-making. Signs that your workplace may be lacking organizational purpose are distracted employees and a lack of comradery. These are significant factors – so why don’t more organizations devote time to developing clear purpose and values? Well, developing organizational purpose is no easy task, and much of it starts with your own personal purpose. If you’re unsure of what exactly your own personal purpose is, have no fear – in the next two installments of this blog series, we will offer simple steps to help you uncover your personal and organizational purposes and get closer to leading through the lens of purpose.
Throughout her more than 15-year career at BTS, Jessica has pioneered turning strategy into action through the use of customized experiences & simulations for leading Fortune 500 clients and many large and start-up software companies in Silicon Valley. Jessica leads BTS USA with P&L responsibility for offices in San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Phoenix, and Austin.
Although one of the most-discussed topics in business today, meaningful diversity seems to be elusive for most companies. We sat down for a casual and candid conversation with Jessica and uncovered some surprising insights about our clients’ challenges in creating a more diverse and inclusive workplace, and what companies can do about it.
We are lucky to have snagged a few moments of Jessica’s time — squeezed between a flight to New York for a client meeting and her morning school drop-off duties — to hear her perspective.
JENNY JONSSON: We have a lot to cover today, so if it’s ok with you, we’re going to jump right in! First, we would love to hear a little about your journey to becoming a Global Partner (GP) – and of course, it’s hard to conduct research for a paper on diversity and ignore that there’s a gender imbalance at our GP level.
JESSICA SKON: Well first of all, while I may be the only female Global Partner, I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that we do have a lot of women leaders at BTS: 35% of our Heads of Office are women. With that said, what I can say about my experience is that it has been fair. I don’t think I would still be here if I didn’t feel the expectations and the performance processes over the last 17 years were fair, and I have never felt like gender has been a factor in performance conversations. When I reflect on that after talking to other female leaders, that’s a pretty big deal.
MJ DOCTORS: Why do you think your experience has been so different from what many other working women encounter?
JS: Before my first Global Partner meeting, where we were looking at candidates for Principal and above, I was told, “This is always the best meeting of the year.” I wondered how it could be so drastically different than any other meeting, but they were right — it is an entirely data-driven, unemotional, and fair process.
It was a simple process and there were no biases. There are three parts to how we evaluate partners up for promotion:
- The background information on each candidate includes all of the specific promotion criteria and supporting data.
- The leader recommending the promotion gives a 5-minute summary emphasizing their view of the candidate’s weaknesses and areas for growth in the coming years.
- A fellow partner who has done due diligence against the facts acts as the “inquisitor” and shares findings.
This approach ensures it isn’t just a pitchfest. And this process is also something that has trickled down to other areas of the business, reducing a lot of the biases in our hiring and promoting.
JJ: Have you been approached by clients asking for guidance on a similar data-driven approach?
JP: Absolutely, clients realize they need to make this shift. I think it’s going to happen really quickly: we already have one client whose CEO has asked us to rebuild their entire performance system so that it’s more data-driven, more accurate, and more fair. In many companies, the way things are now, it’s often gray and you can’t help but rely on relationships and favoritism to guide promotion decisions.
MD: As part of our research, Jenny and I took a look at how BTS USA is performing on diversity metrics. While most publications and companies measure diversity by simply looking at gender and race (such as Fortune’s 50 Most Diverse Companies), we believe diversity is much more than that. Our definition encompasses gender and race, but also age, socioeconomics, gender identity, sexual orientation, education, life experiences, disability status, and personality traits — and the list could go on. However, as we currently only have results across race and gender, that’s what we’ll share here. How do you feel when you look at these charts?
JS: You’re bringing me back to 5 years ago when we had the same color chart for gender as we do now for ethnicity — which was horrifying. I think we all knew it was a problem but we weren’t mature enough in our thinking to solve it. Once we all woke up and clearly defined that we had a gender parity problem across the company, we were persistent and fixed it, and now I am proud of our gender pie chart. That is something I love about BTS: if we can clearly articulate a problem, we tend to be able to solve it. That’s actually the key for leaders across most industries: the art is being able to clearly define the problem.
But I think that we’re at ground zero again for the next phase. I would love for us to apply the same rigor we used to address gender disparities to other forms of diversity so that in 3 or 4 years we have a better mix, and why wouldn’t we?
JJ: Can you outline specifically how we made progress on our lack of gender diversity?
JS: We took a few major steps:
- Our Heads of Office decided it was a top priority. Without top leadership’s buy-in, you can’t really make progress.
- Then we identified the key pain point: for us, it was the entry to the funnel. Then we brainstormed the best ways to attract more female candidates.
- This led to some “ahas” about the root cause of that pain point. Many people think that consulting is inflexible and it’s difficult for employees with children to succeed. But there’s nothing further from the truth at BTS. Our Global CEO is quite progressive and incredibly flexible and open-minded when it comes to letting employees do what they need for their lives.
- So then our leaders got on the megaphone: our (now retired) US CEO began flying to each of our offices to talk about it, and I got on the phone with candidates to tell them my story of being a young working mother. A lot changed once we started to focus on it.
- In reviewing our hiring interview process, we also realized we could be more clear in our criteria, with observable behaviors and a more robust scoring rubric. This change eliminated any unconscious bias and we found that woman were scoring as high as our male candidates. When we looked in the past, they were (on average) scoring lower.
MD: Besides clearly defining the problem, what other factors pushed forward this change?
JS: Clients started noticing and asking for more women consultants, so it became an easy sell to our leadership. Our demographics should match – or even be ahead of – our clients’ demographics. We shouldn’t have to be scrambling every time a client says, “Um… there’s a lot of men here.” Sure, some traditional clients may not have said anything, so for some folks internally it was more difficult to understand the impetus behind the huge investment we were making in changing our recruitment process. But we also had enough examples of women starting at BTS who didn’t have many female role models. And we realized, we have to change this or some of our best people are going to leave.
JJ: So what about our clients? You have spent significant time over the past 20 years with CEOs and senior leaders of some of the world’s top companies. What aspects of diversity are they discussing the most?
JS: In the last couple of months, I have heard many top executives discussing how to change the paradigm of their leaders to promote and move people around who don’t necessarily fit the makeup of the candidates from the past. So for example, one client said that they have been really good at keeping people for life, but realize that they might not be able to maintain that with millennials, unless they can keep having great careers for them.
Also, companies still tend to focus on “the résumé”: did the applicant go to an Ivy League school, did she have a fancy job, how long did he work in this department, etc. All of this has been the formula for success over the last 50 years. But if we don’t crack that mindset, there will be amazing people who don’t get put in the right positions, because unconsciously our leaders are not seeing them or they are not open-minded enough to realize that this candidate might be better suited than that more traditional-looking candidate.
MD: What is some advice you would give clients to change that mindset?
JS: You and all your leaders have to first recognize your beliefs and own them before any mindset change can happen. That may be kind of obvious, but getting yourself and your senior leaders to fully own their beliefs is hard. You have to be both very self-aware and constantly striving to improve. It’s a battle every single day.
So when an executive comes to me and says, “This is weighing on my mind at the company-wide level,” I don’t say, “Well there’s a diversity training that we can do.” I do say, “You’re talking about changing deeply rooted mindsets: this requires getting leaders to articulate, own, and put those issues on the table, and commit to changing their beliefs moving forward.”
This is crucial to making sure you have the right people in the right jobs and you’re retaining the people that you want, which ultimately enables you to make the company successful. That is an immense amount of work, including interventions, working sessions, and sometimes coaching. It’s sometimes getting the most skeptical leaders to become the owners of this and driving these change management efforts. It’s deeper than just a training class.
JJ: If it’s not just a training class, what do you see as the platform?
JS: Any time you’re trying to drive large scale transformation, it’s a good idea to run experiments. And once they get some momentum and prove to be successful, you should shine a really big light on them to get broad adoption and then begin the comprehensive change management process.
So even though it’s out of our core services, I try to give clients ideas on small stuff they can do that is totally different than anything they have done before, to shake up people’s way of thinking about how they recruit, hire, train, promote, and think about people. I think a strong example of an initiative a company has experimented with is a leading software company and their strategic partnerships with nonprofits who help them access more and different talent pools.
So – once those initiatives have gained that momentum, it would be fun for us to do some consulting with their executives first around owning the beliefs, the history (it’s important to honor the history and not just break it), what worked in the past, what beliefs do you now hold as a result, and what are you going to do moving forward. All of this can be built around an experience that shifts people’s mindsets. It’s not so much diversity training… it’s a mindset shift process that starts at top leadership.
MD: Are there any companies that are beginning to successfully make this mindset shift and use more data-driven approaches to evaluation?
JS: Not really… that’s what’s tough about this. It’s bizarrely new. The more BTS is asked to provide broader talent services, the more surprised I am. We’re basically back in the Stone Age. It’s not pretty.
But we’re starting to work on something internally to track an individual’s acquisition of skills in a moment-based approach. At the beginning of a project the individual comes up with specific skills that she wants to work on. Then, during critical milestones and at the completion of the project, the rest of the team gives feedback on those specific areas. That’s real curation of a skillset, where the individual can own her career progress, people can validate it, and the company can say, “oh, she’s telling us she’s ready for a promotion, look, she’s actually done all of these things and demonstrated she can be successful.”
JJ: So really it’s democratizing the job application and promotion process.
JS: Yes! That’s exactly why many of our clients have turned to selection and assessment solutions. Assessments enable our clients to reduce unconscious bias in the hiring and promotion processes and ensure that a candidate has the actual skills necessary for the role, as opposed to a particular degree from a particular university, which is, at best, only a moderate proxy for job fit. Through these solutions, our clients effectively expand their talent pool and improve the likelihood that the candidates they hire have both skill and culture fit, which can lead to increased cognitive diversity – that is, team members who have different backgrounds and thus approach problems in different ways – improved retention, and reduced recruiting costs.
MD: We are seeing some progress from expanded talent pools, but the critical question is, once a female or a non-white employee has joined a company, why aren’t they moving up as fast as white men?
JS: I think maybe it goes back to the issue that I heard from one of our clients: there’s a history of certain roles looking and acting a certain way. It’s hard to overcome the unconscious bias of hiring and promoting people who fit that perception.
It could also be that people aren’t putting their hat in the ring for those promotions. Women and people from certain cultures aren’t oriented toward self-promotion and won’t put their hat in the ring if they are only 10% confident they’ll be successful. So in that case, you really have to focus on the current leaders: it’s so important that they understand this dynamic. Even at BTS, there are so many outstanding individuals who don’t self-promote, and you have to be the megaphone for them.
JJ: When running our leadership development simulation experiences, BTS has always encouraged participants to form the most diverse teams possible (gender, culture, geography, role, tenure, etc.). What’s the origin behind why we ask our clients to create diverse simulation teams?
JS: Initially, this was primarily because our clients value enabling leaders to create networks across the company, more so than because of any inherent desire for cognitive diversity. Clients often come to us when they need a push toward a “one company” mindset, so simulation teams are built to bring people out of their silos and align around a single company goal.
But, nowadays, people recognize that cognitive diversity is a good thing. That being said, at BTS, we are very protective of our culture and team environment, and sometimes we’re guilty of mistaking like-minded people as a proxy for “I think I’ll get along with you”. So you have to have two heads when hiring: we want someone different who will shake us up, but we also want to be at peace and have fun and a strong culture fit.
MD: If you could leave one piece of advice for leaders hoping to create a more diverse and inclusive workplace, what would it be?
JS: In alignment with Liz Wiseman‘s book, “Rookie Smarts,” I’m trying to get leaders to crave being rookies again. If you’re going to learn as fast as the pace of change, and be able to transform yourself, you have to be a bit of an adrenaline junkie with a “rookie mindset”. I want people to realize that it’s not scary to do something different and new – it’s exciting. And, if you put yourself in an uncomfortable role, you get humbled, become curious, and seek advice from the best around you. As a result, you will most likely do the best work of your life.
There is a correlation between the “rookie mindset” and shifting beliefs in support of a more diverse team: we need leaders who crave differences. That has to be the overarching mindset when you’re recruiting and looking to add members to your team. If you crave differences in skills and personal history and combine that with culture-fit, then innovative ideas, high performance, and fun should follow. Others will notice the benefits of the diverse team and follow, assuming the appropriate recruitment and performance systems are in place. That’s how you start to shift mindsets at the top and eventually throughout the company.
About the Authors
Diversity has been a passion area for both MJ Doctors and Jenny Jonsson, both of whom have spent significant time – prior to and while at BTS – working to improve economic opportunities for women, immigrants, and individuals of varying socioeconomic backgrounds.
Leading with Purpose, Part 2
As we discussed in the first post of this blog series, purpose is an essential ingredient for business success and employee engagement today. Yet purpose is a nebulous concept, and often difficult to pinpoint. I know this firsthand. Around twelve years ago, a consultant in his early 20s joined the BTS San Francisco office where I was working, and I took him out to lunch. Within ten minutes of sitting down to lunch, he asked me, “So what’s your purpose? Why have you been at the firm for so long?” I’ll never forget it. I’d been at the company over six years, and that was the first time somebody asked me that. I felt it was a fair question, and yet I didn’t have an eloquent answer at the ready.
Coming up with a response, I started to talk about some of my guiding principles, things like learning and having fun, how I’m proud of the impact our work has on clients, and how I love building a team of leaders (or a business) that grows every year. The question from this new hire, though, who was probably ten years younger than me, put me on the spot and made me feel a bit inadequate as a leader. At first I did not have a crisp, compelling answer.
Since then I’ve been in many dinners with other executives from Fortune 500 companies to tech startups, who more and more frequently are being expected to lead their organizations with a clear purpose… and at the same time understand that each employee’s purpose and what motivates them is going to be slightly different than theirs, the firm’s and their peers’, and that’s okay. Once a leader or a firm has clarity of purpose it can be a beautiful energy and driving force, and should be the first lens with which leaders run their business.
So, how does one find a sense of purpose?
In truth, many people assume that only those who follow a vocation like medicine, teaching or work in the charitable sectors can have a true sense of purpose at work. Our experience, as well as much current research and writing, would suggest otherwise.
One simple way of looking at this is captured elegantly by the Japanese concept of Ikigai, or ‘The reason for being.’ The idea of Ikigai is that one’s sense of purpose lies at the intersection of the answer to four questions:
- What do I love?
- What am I good at?
- What can I get paid for?
- What does the world need?
Image from Forbes.com
Take these four questions and look at the organization you are already a part of. Use them to see if you are in touching distance of doing more purposeful work, whether it be at the core of what you do or as a part of work that sits slightly outside the current definition of your job. Whilst we may not get the ultimate answer to the purpose question from our current work, once we have identified our own Ikigai we can go in search of the more meaningful elements of our jobs and start shaping the agenda at work in a new way. In the next installment in this blog series, we will discuss how to use your personal purpose to shape your organizational purpose and lead with meaning.