Blog Posts

If you’ve been following along, you know we’ve shared two key mantras for leaders managing through the change of the past 18 months: Put on your oxygen mask first. Focus on your most important relationships.

There is a third silver lining that our senior leader clients have told us they want to bring forward as they begin to see the light at the end of the Zoom tunnel.

‍Ruthlessly prioritize your time and the time of your team. Call it effectiveness, call it efficiency, call it productivity – it’s all about getting stuff done, but making sure it’s the right stuff. The wild early days of the pandemic forced many leaders to get ultra-focused on the most important things to get them through the crisis. As pressures ease, it has become easier to get distracted and go back to the days of trying to do it all. But now is not the time to return to those bad habits. Now is the time to focus, prioritize, and draw some boundaries.

According to Gallup’s latest State of the American Workplace report, only a third of employees are engaged at work. At the other end, 16% of employees are actively disengaged, and the remaining 51% of employees are not engaged — they’re just there. Even worse? 65 percent of managers – the ones most likely to influence employee engagement – are disengaged. So why does any of that matter? Because engagement is directly related to productivity. From your seat in the C-Suite, this ought to be pretty scary.

The tailwinds of the pandemic, against the backdrop of a slowly rebounding economy and questions about return to work strategies, create a tough environment to try and get the most effectiveness out of your team. So how do you keep fatigued leaders focused and productive while the new normal shakes out?

1. Get clear about priorities. Pick a small number of the most critical activities that have a strong line of sight to the organization’s strategy. Build clear agreements within your team and with other teams on the top priorities and on who ultimately serves as the decision maker. Repeat these priorities until you are blue in the face so there is no confusion.
2. Provide air cover: Help clear the way and minimize distractions so your team can focus on the work at hand. Establish a set of criteria or questions you can ask to map new ideas and requests back to the core priorities – if the work doesn’t support the broader agreed-upon themes – it doesn’t happen. Empower your team to say no.
3. Create white space: It’s impossible to build, modify, or execute on a plan when there is no room for preparation or reflection. Scenario planning and innovative thinking require white space. It's hard to come up with new ideas or see different angles when you're under fire, feeling the pressure. Your leaders need quiet time and reflection to settle their brains and open up to other possibilities.

Get clear about priorities

‍We are working with a C-suite team right now that has been plagued by what you might call “squirrel chasing.” For about a year, they have repeated a cycle of spending a great deal of time building strategies and plans, only to change them in the days and weeks after finalizing those plans. Deeper down in the organization, this “swirl” is causing less than optimal execution and the loss of key talent.

The antidote is simple. It starts with creating a team purpose and set of operating principles that define how the team will work together. Commit to agreements about how decisions will get made, how work will get discussed, what expectations exist for interpersonal dynamics. If you’re worrying about the ability of the team to have candor, to collaborate effectively, or drive toward a common goal – it’s really difficult to get aligned on a set of priorities. We’ve all been part of teams where those agreements aren’t explicitly laid out and best case scenario, it leads to incorrect assumptions and process breakdowns. Worst case scenario, it leads to dysfunctional team dynamics that derail the work altogether. Once you have this alignment, turn your attention to a short list of business priorities – and stick to it.

‍Consider using the Eisenhower Matrix if your leaders are struggling to prioritize or fall subject to squirrel chasing. Gather your team around a virtual whiteboard and follow this process:

• Step 1: List the major activities that need to be completed by your team
• Step 2: Score these on importance or impact (from 0 for no importance to 10 for maximum importance) and on urgency and time sensitivity (0 to 10)
• Step 3: Plot the activities on the matrix, based on your scores:
  • High Importance/Low Urgency (Decide)
  • High Importance/High Urgency (Do!)
  • Low Importance/Low Urgency (Delete)
  • Low Importance/High Urgency (Delegate)
• Step 4: Prioritize appropriately and encourage your leaders to delegate or eliminate low-importance activities. If they forget, get out the matrix and remind them.

Provide air cover
‍
‍Once you have a clear sense of strategic priorities and the team is aligned on the go-forward plan, what could go wrong? A ton.

There’s any number of roadblocks that could derail your team’s productivity – time, money, people, emotions - for starters.

If your team is worried about missteps or failing, if they don’t have the resources they need to execute, if they have to expend time and energy justifying the strategy to stakeholders – well, they aren’t going to get it done, at least not with a sense of efficiency and productivity. Enter YOU. The idea of air cover is to offer your team some level of protection or advocacy that allows them to stay heads down, take necessary risks, say no to others, and occasionally – test and fail in order to succeed. So what does that look like?

• Remember you’re not the pilot. You’re not there to intercede and tell them how to do it differently. You’re there to knock down barriers that might get in their way. Air cover is support, not control.
• Give them a clear runway. Eliminate other projects on their plate. Cut back on meetings you’ve asked them to attend. Explain to other team members why and how they are involved. Clearly convey your support of and trust in your leaders. Reduce the queries that come their way by anticipating and preempting them. And support them when they say no to others in the organization.
• Know enough to be helpful. Don’t get into the weeds or micromanage the project in case you need to step in. Rather, set up a system in which updates can be shared and red flags can be raised early enough for you to react and give guidance.
• Get clear on the team’s expectations of you. When they do raise that red flag, make sure you understand what kind of air cover they need. Should you run interference with senior stakeholders? Do you need to help solicit additional funding or resources? Or do you just need to be aware what the potential outcomes can be so you can help defend?

Create white space
‍
‍At the beginning of the pandemic, we jumped into the virtual environment with gusto, socializing and meeting online in an effort to maintain a sense of connection and productivity. That has largely proved to be unsustainable and in many cases has created a counterproductive schedule that allows for very little reflection, planning, and prep time. And though it may feel counterintuitive, if we don’t slow down and reflect, we really can’t move forward.

How do you help your leaders with this?

• Model it: We can hardly tell our teams about the importance of white space if we’re running from one thing to the next. Rather than have standing meetings, set up set “office hours” to check in with team members. Shift weekly 1:1s to biweekly. Use Microsoft’s ‘Focus Plan’ option to hold empty slots in your calendar. In other words, demonstrate the importance of rebalancing and then give your leaders permission to do the same.
• Shorten your meetings: No one needs 60-minute meetings. What we all need is efficient, well-run, intentional meetings which can often happen in a fraction of an hour. Ask your team to create meeting agendas and share materials in advance. Use the time to discuss key points in an open dialogue rather than waste it in “presentation” mode. You’ll save some time on the back end.
• Change up your routine: How much of our grind is tied to a daily routine of log in, check emails, respond to emails, and so on? Perhaps we need to shake it up. Try starting with reflection time (ignore the inbox!) rather than trying to do it at the end of the day when you’re tired. Better yet, change your environment. Relocate to a different spot that might add inspiration – an outdoor coffee shop, a park bench, even a different room in your house!

We know we’re living in different times even since we started this blog series six months ago. We’ve talked about the importance of maintaining balance and leveraging connections to manage through the constant change. What we underestimated is just how much that “change” continues to be a part of the permanent landscape. But we also know that as senior executives, you have to keep driving your business forward – asking your teams to step up, be productive, drive for results.

And it’s possible to do both. Lead with empathy. Help draw work-life boundaries. Encourage relationship building. Break down barriers. Set clear goals.

In other words, use the silver linings we’ve gleaned from the past 18 months to define a completely new leadership model that works for you, your team, and your business. Embrace the new normal – it’s here to stay.

3 pasos para pasar de la planificación a la acción

¿Recuerda la última vez que hizo algo después de leer un artículo o un libro interesante?

La gente suele tener dificultades para pasar de la planificación a la acción. ¿Por qué? Hay dos factores críticos que deben estar alineados: la mentalidad y la visión de los comportamientos.

La mentalidad correcta es fundamental. La mentalidad es el profundo reconocimiento de uno mismo que le proporciona el impulso esencial para realizar un cambio. Sin embargo, la mentalidad por sí sola no puede crear el cambio: también hay que prever cómo encajan los nuevos comportamientos en la vida diaria.

Prever los comportamientos es el proceso de ver los momentos y las oportunidades en los que se pueden aprovechar los nuevos conocimientos para crear el cambio. Si se toma el tiempo de imaginar cómo es una nueva acción, es mucho más probable que cambie su comportamiento.

Permitir los cambios de mentalidad y comportamiento es una habilidad crítica para los líderes de hoy en día, especialmente para aquellos que quieren aprovechar su equipo al máximo. Este tipo de líder se llama Multiplicador.

Un Multiplicador es alguien que cree que puede acceder a más inteligencia de su equipo aprovechando las mayores fortalezas de cada individuo. Este concepto fue creado por Liz Wiseman, autora del best seller del NYT Multipliers, un libro con el mismo nombre, que comparte la investigación sobre el tema.

El concepto de Multiplicadores pretende provocar que los líderes reflexionen y analicen el impacto que tienen en su equipo en cada momento crítico e interacción. Así, para catalizar un cambio real basado en la mentalidad y la previsión de nuevos comportamientos, es necesario:

1. Reviva los momentos críticos en los que interactuó con su equipo

Considere un momento típico de la empresa: una reunión de estado de un proyecto, por ejemplo. Puede ser un momento en el que se refuerza la estrategia de la empresa, en el que se libera a un miembro del equipo para que pruebe una nueva idea o en el que se reta a un trabajador medio a ser excelente. Este es exactamente el tipo de momento en el que puede alterar su comportamiento para amplificar la inteligencia de su equipo.

Sin embargo, en el momento, es posible que no tenga la oportunidad de examinar críticamente cómo lo que dice o hace puede lograr resultados óptimos. Por lo tanto, es importante tomarse un tiempo después de la interacción o incluso imaginar anticipadamente escenarios en los que pueda ayudar a su equipo a aprovechar más su inteligencia natural.

2. Identificar los comportamientos óptimos.

Antes o después de una reunión, piense críticamente en lo que se dijo y en lo que hizo cada empleado como resultado. ¿Hubo algún momento en el que podrías haber animado a un empleado a hablar? ¿O cuando el miembro de tu equipo que siempre comparte sus ideas podría haber escuchado con más atención a los demás? Pensar en estas situaciones para examinar cómo puede animar a los miembros de su equipo a aprovechar sus mejores habilidades es fundamental para mejorar el trabajo en equipo y maximizar la inteligencia.

3. Practica el entrenamiento de tu equipo en un entorno sin riesgos.

Si bien es cierto que puede practicar la representación de estas intervenciones entre sus colegas, la mejor manera de ejercitar la mentalidad de los multiplicadores es en un entorno libre de riesgos, como una simulación empresarial personalizada. En una experiencia simulada, podrá revivir fácilmente los momentos críticos, identificar los comportamientos óptimos y practicarlos una y otra vez.

Pasar de la planificación a la acción es un reto importante, pero al adoptar una mentalidad de Multiplicadores, volver a vivir los momentos críticos, poner en práctica los comportamientos óptimos y practicar las intervenciones del equipo, seguro que podrá aprovechar la inteligencia de su equipo más de lo que nunca imaginó.

Can you remember the last time you actually did something after reading an insightful article or book?

People often struggle to make the shift from planning to action. Why? There are two critical factors that need to be aligned: mindsets and envisioning behaviors.

The right mindset is critical. Mindsets are the deep self-acknowledgement that provides you with the essential drive to make a shift. However, mindset alone cannot create change – you also need to envision how new behaviors fit into your daily life.

Envisioning behaviors is the process of seeing the moments and opportunities where you can actually leverage new insights to create change. By taking the time to imagine what a new action looks like, you are much more likely to shift your behavior.

Enabling mindset and behavior shifts is a critical skill for today’s leaders – especially those that want to leverage their team to its fullest potential. This type of leader is called a Multiplier.

A Multiplier is someone who believes that they can access more of their team’s intelligence by tapping into each individual’s greatest strengths. This concept was created by Liz Wiseman, NYT best-selling author of Multipliers, a book of the same name, which shares research on the subject.

The Multipliers concept is intended to trigger leaders to reflect and analyze the impact they have on their team in every critical moment and interaction. Thus, in order to catalyze real change based on mindsets and envisioning new behaviors, you need to:

1. Relive critical moments when you interacted with your team.

Consider a typical business moment – a project status meeting, for example. This can be a time when you reinforce the company strategy, when a team member is liberated to try a new idea, or when an average performer is challenged to be great. This is exactly the type of moment when you can alter your behavior to amplify your team’s intelligence.

However, in the moment, you might not have the opportunity to critically examine how what you say or do can achieve optimal results. So, it’s important to take time post-interaction or even preemptively imagine scenarios where you can help your team tap into more of their natural intelligence.

2. Identify the optimal behaviors.

In advance of or after a meeting, think critically about what was said and what each employee did as a result. Was there a time when you could have encouraged an employee to speak up? Or when your team member who always shares their ideas could have listened more carefully to others? Thinking through these scenarios to examine how you can encourage your team members to leverage their best skills is critical for improving teamwork and maximizing intelligence.

3. Practice coaching your team in a risk-free environment.

While you can certainly practice role-playing these interventions among your colleagues, the best way to exercise a Multipliers’ mindset is in a risk-free environment such as a customized business simulation. In a simulated experience, you’ll easily be able to relive the critical moments, identify optimal behaviors, and practice them over and over again.

Making the shift from planning to action is a significant challenge, but by engaging a Multipliers mindset, revisiting critical moments, implementing optimal behaviors, and practicing team interventions, you’re certain to be able to leverage even more of your team’s intelligence than you ever imagined.

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN and SAN FRANCISCO, CA — BTS GROUP AB (publ) a world-leading strategy implementation firm, was recently named a Top 25 Sales Training Companies 2021 by Selling Power

“It is an honor to be recognized as one of the world’s leading sales training companies,” said Rene Groeneveld, Global Head of BTS’s Sales and Marketing Practice. “2020 challenged BTS to deliver world-class solutions in a fully virtual environment. We took the opportunity to innovate, helping sellers, sales leaders and marketeers shift the way they sell and communicate. Leveraging these new capabilities, we are excited by the possibility of enabling our clients’ success.”

Companies on the list submitted a comprehensive application, which included their offerings for training and retention, innovative solutions, unique contributions to the sales training marketplace, and response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The main criteria for evaluation included:

1. Depth and breadth of training offered
2. Innovative offerings (courses, methodology, or delivery methods)
3. Contributions to the sales training market
4. Strength of client satisfaction

Selling Power also considered feedback from over 350 clients, which included:

• “They have been nimble with changes related to COVID-19 and have provided great ‘value add’ activities to continually strengthen the relationship”
• “Our experiences have been exemplary and have far exceeded our expectations”
• “Simply the best training and coaching in our industry”
• “Skilled, knowledgeable, and very experienced at driving sales performance through training and coaching”
• “An integral part of our transformation journey. We are so grateful for their expertise and contributions”

Selling Power advises CROs, sales VPs, and sales enablement leaders to leverage the list to find the right sales training partner for success in the hybrid-virtual environment.

I was recently speaking with a board member of a public company. He was providing some feedback about the company CEO, a first-time chief executive who was still “getting his sea legs,” and had some work to do to gain the confidence of the rest of the board of this traditional, conservative company.

As the executive coach for this CEO, I was expecting to hear about the company’s overall performance, which had been negatively impacted by Covid-19, or receive feedback about the CEO’s first-ever earnings call or recent board meeting. Instead, the board member spent time focused on leadership, culture, and leading change. The insights were straightforward and can be applied to most senior leaders. For example:

1. Don’t assume the board knows more than they do. It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that our audiences know more than they do. No matter how sophisticated or experienced the audience, watch for the temptation to rush through points that may seem unnecessary to highlight. As this board member pointed out regarding the CEO: “We’re here to learn from you. Point out the obvious. Spell it out. Tell us what you’re seeing, what you’re learning. If the organization is winning, why are you winning? If things are working, tell us why. Don’t assume we’ll just get it.”

2.  Share your vision for big growth. The CEO had been in the job less than six months and had recently shared his long-term strategy with the board, only to receive mixed reviews. After a year of COVID, the CEO underestimated how much pent up demand the board had for a message centered around big growth, new capital investments and where the next big bets should be placed. The board member put it this way. “Will the world need this company in 5, 10 years? Why? What is the next big thing for us? What do you see? Can you paint us a compelling picture of what the future can look like?” He added this recommendation: “As a first-time CEO, we need to see that you are the leader who can bring us into the future. We need to know that you’ve got the followership and trust of your employees behind you.”

3. Acknowledge that leading change today requires a different approach. Major change and transformation initiatives are big-ticket programs with lots at stake, so no surprise that they are likely to receive extra scrutiny and attention from the board. The board member commented, “This company has never led a major transformation in a fully virtual environment. What we don’t want is to see the same approach we’ve used in the past to create change today. We just don’t believe that will work anymore.” He added, “Every single leader at this company must be incented and motivated to become a change leader. The changes we need to make are too substantial to be led by a small group or committee of ‘change ambassadors.’ That won’t work anymore.” The board wanted to know that the CEO had a strong plan in place to ensure that he had the ability to win hearts and minds and operationalize change with an entirely virtual workforce.

Thoughtful feedback from board members is always valuable, particularly when it’s offered in the spirit of helping a CEO succeed to the highest level possible. In 2021, their messages are even more important to hear at a time when the playbook for companies and leadership is being rewritten. COVID has created a new landscape, and boards have a valuable and unique role to play in creating a better future for employees and companies everywhere. CEOs and senior leaders will do well to listen and learn.

Successfully enabling sales managers to become great sales coaches requires a comprehensive approach. This includes defining what great sales coaching looks like, allows managers to experience great coaching, and enables them to execute it on the job. Shifting sales managers’ mindsets is only the starting point. While training on coaching capabilities alone can be costly in terms of time, performance, and ultimately revenue, combining individualized coaching and training delivers maximum ROI for both your managers and your bottom line.

STOCKHOLM & SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Henrik Ekelund, founder and CEO of BTS GROUP AB (publ), a world-leading strategy implementation firm, was recently recognized by SvD, a leading Swedish daily newspaper, as one of five finalists in its “2021 Business Achievement of the Year” Awards.

Henrik Ekelund, Founder and CEO of BTS Group AB, Selected as One of Five Finalists in SvD’s “2021 Business Achievement of the Year” Awards due to BTS’s Transformation to Virtual Solutions

Tweet this

“It is an honor to be selected,” said Ekelund. “We are grateful to be recognized among many of Sweden’s leading organizations for our entrepreneurial efforts, specifically the rapid expansion of our virtual capabilities and products to deliver our solutions to anyone, anywhere.”SvD’s “Business Achievement of the Year” award highlights business leaders who inspire growth, endure struggle, and dare to dream that their organization will become the next global leader. The competition, instituted in 2014, is held in collaboration between SvD and the Swedish investment bank Carnegie. Previous winners include leading organizations such as Spotify.In the 2021 competition, Ekelund and BTS were selected as a finalist by popular vote. A jury will select a winner among the five finalists and the award will be presented in a virtual ceremony by Prince Daniel, the Spouse of Princess Victoria, the Crown Princess of Sweden, on May 11^th, 2021 in connection with the Swedish Young Entrepreneurship Champions.

About BTS Group AB

BTS is a global professional services firm that partners with clients to enable strategy execution. We provide the skills, tools, and knowledge so people understand how their daily work impacts business results. We are experts in behavior change, care deeply about delivering results, and inspire people do the best work of their lives. It’s strategy made personal.BTS is a public company trading on the Nasdaq Stockholm under the symbol BTS B.

About SvD

Svenska Dagbladet (SvD), founded in 1884, is a national subscription newspaper with head offices in Stockholm. SvD is a daily publication which focuses on in-depth coverage in its weekend editions in the form of supplements and magazines. In 2005 and 2010, the newspaper was voted the Newspaper of the Year in Sweden. Its circulation figures have risen dramatically in recent years.

Contacts

Rick CheathamCMOrick.cheatham@bts.com+1 (512) 897-9594

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN and SAN FRANCISCO, CA – BTS GROUP AB (publ), a world-leading strategy implementation firm, was recently recognized a Top 20 Sales Training Company by Training Industry.

“We are honored to be named one of the world’s top 20 sales training companies,” said Rene Groeneveld, Global Head of the BTS Sales and Marketing Practice. “In 2020, BTS was challenged to deliver world-class solutions in a fully virtual environment. We used this as an opportunity to accelerate innovation, supporting sellers, sales leaders and marketeers in areas such as virtual selling, virtual communication, and in our Acceleration modules, which are learning bursts that drive high levels of engagement and interaction. We are proud of our response and feel excited about how our virtual and digital capabilities have unlocked new possibilities to help our clients achieve success.”

BTS was selected based on the following criteria:

“The quick adaptation and innovation of programs in response to customers’ needs during the pandemic has earned these organizations a spot on this year’s Top 20 Sales Training and Enablement Companies List,” said Ken Taylor, president of Training Industry, Inc. “Through virtual offerings and a focus on selling virtually, these companies prepare their clients’ sales force with the tools to succeed in today’s remote work environment.”

BTS has identified the mindsets around 6 critical areas that FMCGs need to master to be successful in 2021 and beyond.

Originally published by Entrepreneur here.

For leaders, 2020 was a troublesome year. The global health crisis brought swift (and sometimes painful) changes to the way we work and live. This meant leaders had to help employees manage historically high levels of stress and respond to challenges more quickly than they ever thought possible.

‍To better understand what organizations needed from their leaders, my company interviewed dozens of top decision-makers about how they responded to the economic crisis and determined their organization’s future approach. Interestingly, that research demonstrated that many previously successful leaders were struggling. In fact, 2020 acted seemingly like an accelerator; traits that were found only in the minority of leaders were seen more broadly — and arguably became essential to thriving in our new normal.

But why? The answer is simple: 2020 demanded that leaders be empathetic, engage in hot-button issues, look outside their company to society at large, relinquish processes, trust their employees and respond to changes in a moment's notice. Before March 2020, leaders with these traits made up a minority of leaders. And though more traditionally-minded leaders often struggle to embody these qualities, they’re now a requirement for future success.

Last year brought an entire host of issues to their boiling points, with racial injustice, economic inequality and a mental health crisis among them. This has created a demand for more inclusive cultures, greater diversity in buying choices and a shift toward a workforce that’s increasingly global and virtual-first.

The future will bring even more unpredictable change at a breakneck pace, so leaders must prepare to face vexing challenges in the coming years. Here's why the following traits — which can be seen as endemic in “messy” leaders — could also bring success.

1. They prioritize compassion over old-school professionalism

According to a Gallup poll, reports of daily worry among full-time workers increased from 37 percent in 2019 to 60 percent in 2020.

The old “we only talk business here” leadership approach might work during stable times. But when employees are struggling emotionally and perhaps financially, it comes across as out of touch and cold. Our team of researchers found that leaders who struggled to cope during the lockdown and 2020’s racial-justice reckoning were those with a tendency to use professionalism as a shield to avoid difficult but necessary conversations. Regardless, we’ve reached a point where organizations can no longer sidestep sensitive topics such as race and mental health. Employees are demanding to have these conversations, and many leaders feel exposed.

By contrast, the leaders who fared well were those with the courage to talk about emotional (and even controversial) topics, thereby engaging their employees on a decidedly personal level. They reached into the void because it was important to their people. They understood that change starts with broaching tough subjects.

To mirror these messy leaders’ traits, key players should consider how to reach out to support their employees and their communities. They should prioritize compassion over professionalism and get comfortable engaging in personal conversations without any agenda other than deepening their own understanding. They might find it difficult to initiate these talks with many employees still working from home. Instead of waiting for chance interactions, however, they might find that these conversations need to happen during specific meetings rather than between them.

2020 was also the year in which leaders felt accountable for societal impact in a way they’d never felt before. Before 2020, it was possible to work within a relatively loose set of ethical aspirations, but leaders generally worked off the assumption that decisions should be made primarily through a commercial lens. Last year demanded that leaders deeply understand how their business decisions impact the world at large.

We saw this in action in the varying ways businesses responded to the pandemic: For instance, Wisconsin craft distilleries made news when they converted part of their production lines toward making hand sanitizer. Many of these companies offered hand sanitizer for free at a time when their businesses were struggling, but they already had such strong ties to their local communities that they understood the importance of taking positive action anyway.

Related: Emotional Intelligence is the Secret to Leadership in Times of Crisis

2. They focus less on processes and more on outcomes

One of the common characteristics of leaders who struggled to find their footing in 2020 was an overreliance on processes that slow down change. When the crisis hit, these leaders looked to the past for cues about the future, and they attempted to “manage” the change the way they always had.

This approach was problematic for two reasons: First, most of us had never seen widespread lockdowns triggered by a pandemic, so the past didn’t offer any helpful models for predicting the future. Second, traditional change management assumes that change is a linear process with a clear beginning, middle and end, but CEOs are increasingly being forced to lead in an environment where change is constant.

The leaders who have thrived in the unpredictable environment created by this global health crisis are those who were already change-ready. These are the “messy” leaders who care more about outcomes than processes, allowing them to respond rapidly to changing conditions.

Case in point: The Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center was able to drastically ramp up its telehealth capabilities in a matter of weeks, even though its data models suggested it would take several years. In our own study, another leader told the story of moving 14,000 staff members out of a head office to work remotely. If the company had even contemplated such a change under normal conditions, it would’ve spent months in the assessment and implementation phases. Without time to spare, however, leaders set goals, trusted their staff and made the switch in just five days.

Now, CEOs are recognizing that the biggest barriers to boldness and speed aren’t technical limitations. Rather, preconceived mindsets about what’s possible, processes that slow things down and bottlenecks created by chains of command are the true limiting factors. To succeed in a future where the next crisis is always looming, leaders must accept change as a constant.

When they always expect that conditions could change, leaders can replace traditional forecasting processes with fast-cycle experimentation. Leaders should stop trying to plan and predict future scenarios. Instead, they should take the actions that are most appropriate in the moment and adjust their approach as data emerges.

Related: 5 Essential WFH Tools for the New Remote Employee

3. They embrace the power of not knowing

We found that leaders who struggled the most during the crisis were those who fell victim to “superhero syndrome,” or wanting to put on a brave face for their employees to project strength and expertise. Leaders who were well-respected in normal times found their people looking to them for guidance, but this only created bottlenecks and inhibited creativity. When the pace of change became too fast for them to lead from the front as they always had, many tried to compensate by working longer, unsustainable hours.

In contrast, the leaders who were able to weather the crisis best were those with the confidence to take themselves out of the driver’s seat and admit that they didn’t have all the answers. They were willing to let go of their attachment to driving outcomes — choosing, instead, to embody vulnerability, humility, and trust.

Letting go of the need to project strength and be all-knowing creates acceptance to working differently. It allows teams to take ownership of change and respond with greater speed. This doesn’t mean leaders should succumb to the impulse to fall apart. Rather, it means gathering all the smartest people in the room and asking, “How do you think we should handle this?” When leaders aren’t busy trying to hold the world on their shoulders, it frees them up to focus on the things that matter.

2020 permanently changed the business landscape, and consequent responses will likely impact how organizations deal with every pitfall in 2021 and onward. The world will stay messy, meaning leaders must learn to lead in a messy way. They must shift from a wait-and-see mindset to a test-and-learn approach to business. Those who always expect change, lean into the unknown, and take a distinctly human approach will be perfectly positioned for whatever the future might bring.

In other words, what and how you say something becomes much more meaningful and lands more heavily as you move up the ranks. Same goes with your actions. It’s a great position of influence to be in – but it comes with a pretty big responsibility – one that leaders often don’t realize until it’s too late.I recently worked with a client who had just been promoted to head up a large business unit at a global technology firm. She was successfully making the leap from leadership team peer to executive leader in all ways but one – setting boundaries with her team. Gone were the days of commiserating over shared experiences, tough clients, unhappiness with company policies. Like it or not, she was now a boss at the executive team level, and she needed to support the strategic priorities of the broader organization.Experts in the team management space talk about this idea of a “First Team” – in other words, leaders must prioritize the team they are a member of over the team they lead. It’s a well-intentioned model that seeks to break down silos, and force managers out of a fierce – and often insular – advocacy of their functional team at the expense of the enterprise. However, it comes with risks. Skew too far to the left, you lose the trust and credibility of your direct reports. Skew too far to the right and your executive team peers feel you’re biased and not acting in the best interest of the organization.So how do you strike a balance? Six tips for a seamless leadership transition:

1. Don’t second guess yourself: You already got the job. You don’t have to take a heavy-handed leadership approach with peers or micromanage direct reports to demonstrate your value. Be confident in your position, and humble in your approach.
2. Talk less, smile more: You’re used to rolling up your sleeves and finding solutions. But not only will you not have all the answers in this new position, your role has changed. You’re no longer working along side your team – you’re the facilitator and empowerer. Ask questions rather than make recommendations. Show the team you trust them.
3. Set clear expectations: Discuss the team’s role in decision making and priority setting. Be clear about when and how you’ll share information and set up open communication channels for raising concerns and gathering feedback. Help create structure for this new dynamic which is awkward for your old team too.
4. Be ok not being “in”: Your personal relationships with peers will change when they become your direct reports – especially as you move up in the organization. It’s a tough pill to swallow, and one that no one really tells you about. Don’t take it to heart – focus on the positive culture you can foster so that the team feels unified, connected, and supported from within.
5. Focus on fair play: To the prior point, you need to reset your interactions to ensure equity. There’s a tendency for recently promoted executives to share information and updates – even innocuous ones – with former peers who they were close to and talked to more frequently. This will only reinforce mistrust and competition within the team. Keep the side conversations on the sidelines.
6. Find a peer confidante: We’ve heard the saying that it’s lonely at the top – but leaders need to vent too. It will be tempting to overshare with your team, so it’s important to have a thought partner or colleague who can help you think through challenges. Think broadly – beyond your company – and find partners in your network with similar seniority and roles who can serve as a sounding board or outlet when things get frustrating.

Under normal circumstances, these transitions can be tough. In a virtual environment – it’s tougher. You don’t have the benefit of in-person conversations, travel to different offices, or team sessions to build rapport and create excitement about the path ahead. Rather, you have to be intentional about redefining and building relationships with each new stakeholder. Consider a “Listening Tour” – set up 1:1s to ask peers and directs how they prefer to communicate and receive information in this environment, how frequently they like to meet, and what kind of support and balance they need right now. You can start demonstrating your leadership style from day one – using empathy and concern as a foundation.

While taking on a bigger role often creates a different dynamic, being an “executive” doesn’t mean leading without transparency or authenticity. Quite the opposite. But it does require a new mindset and reframing of your role to protect and buffer the team from unnecessary conflict or issues, while recognizing that you have new stakeholders to build relationships with. Broaden your loyalties, set necessary boundaries, communicate often, demonstrate empathy, and above else – build self-awareness around the impact of your whisper.

Onboarding new employees into the organization is a critical step in the employment lifecycle.

Without proper onboarding, newcomers run the risk of failing to:

• Learn how the organization operates
• Identify how best to perform their job and help the organization achieve its objectives
• Engage with their new team

So when does onboarding start?

It's not uncommon for organizations to think of onboarding as kicking off on the first day of employment. Afterall, that's when employees receive their computer, email account, access to company information, and perhaps even meet their team for the first time, among many other things.

In reality, onboarding new employees starts long before their first day on the job. It actually starts when they apply for the job, and sometimes even earlier depending on what is publicized about the organization and role.

Throughout the hiring process, candidates begin to form impressions of what life in the organization and job will be like. Does your hiring process and all its components teach candidates about the role and life in the organization?

If not, imagine the possibilities if you could jumpstart the onboarding process by harnessing this time that you have with future employees. Not only could time to proficiency decrease, but retention could also increase because candidates are better informed about life in the organization and role.

What does this actually look like? Here are four elements that should be factored into every hiring process at every organization:

1. ‍An engaging experience that keeps candidates…well…engaged. The objective of the talent acquisition process is to identify, screen, assess, and select candidates, not to entertain them. But that doesn't mean that the process should be as exciting as a root canal, either.
   
   With appropriately designed assessments and interviews (conducted by properly trained interviewers, of course) the talent acquisition process can and should be engaging. Just like eLearning, people should feel good about the time that they spend going through the process—they should feel like it was time well-spent.
   
   And once you have candidates engaged, keep them engaged (often referred to as “warm”) through regular communication. There is little worse for a candidate than wondering where they are in the process, whether the organization has ruled them out, or when a decision will be made.
   
   You want candidates to be excited about the prospect of working for your organization, as this excitement turns into increased job offer acceptance rates as well as increased engagement and performance once on the job.
2. ‍An appropriately rigorous process. This is a balance, and a bit like the British fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The process can't be so rigorous that it dies under its own weight, nor can it be so light that it lacks utility.
   
   What do these two scenarios tell the candidate? The former scenario tells the candidate that the organization overengineers things and makes them more complicated than they need to be—that doesn't sound very fun (unless you also like to overengineer things).
   
   The latter scenario tells the candidate that the organization spends time on things with very little impact—also not good. Instead, Goldilocks likes a process that is just right.
   
   This, of course, depends on the role itself. Candidates for an entry-level role will likely be put off by a lengthy process with numerous steps, whereas candidates for a senior-level role will likely feel unheard by an extremely brief process that consists of a single interview. Instead, align the level of rigor to the role, and make certain that the process conveys the right message to candidates.
3. ‍Assessments modeled after the job and organization. This is perhaps the hardest element to incorporate, but it's also one of the most critical. If you want to know whether a candidate will be able to learn a procedure to produce widgets, the best way to assess this is to put them in a situation where they have to learn a procedure to produce widgets.
   
   Of course, asking them about times when they had to learn something new or administering an assessment of learning ability would both be informative, but nothing will be as informative as having them demonstrate their ability to perform the job.And guess what else this does—it teaches the candidate about the job. The candidate walks away from the hiring process knowing exactly what the job will entail and how closely the job aligns with what the candidate wants.
   
   Granted, most employees will not be hired to produce widgets and instead hired to make decisions, lead others, develop new products, advise customers, etc. These kinds of roles are a bit harder to emulate in the hiring process, but it can still be done.
   
   And the benefits to predicting future job success, reducing time to proficiency, and reducing turnover are well-worth the time and energy to get it right.
4. ‍On-brand messaging. Finally, the hiring process and all of its steps should convey the message about the organization that the organization wants to convey.A tech company, for example, should not have a paper-based application process—what would that say to candidates? An organization that prides itself on having a warm and inviting culture should not have a cold and sterile process—recruiters and interviewers should be warm, assessments should be welcoming rather than intimidating.

The point is that throughout the entire hiring process, candidates piece together what they think is true about the organization and job. When this picture is accurate, the organization and candidate both win. When the picture is inaccurate, no one wins.

It’s no secret that talent acquisition is a mission-critical piece of the employment lifecycle, but it can be used as more than just as a selection tool. By reviewing the process, engagement, messaging, and implementing the proper assessments, your organization can gain more than just a great hire—you’ll get one who is excited, eager and enthusiastic to advance both the culture and the business.

My son's violin teacher recently posted this challenge on Facebook:

Find the correct result.

1+4=5

2+5=12

3+6=21

5+8=_________

I immediately thought I had the answer: 34. I, like many of the people responding, took the sum of each equation and added it to the equation just below to fill in the blank. Another large contingent guessed 45, getting there by using multiplication. It turned out that we were all wrong.

Both answers can be considered to be correct if the challenge is to fill in the blank. The problem was that was not the challenge. The challenge quite clearly and simply asks the solver to "find the correct result." So this is a not really a challenge of math. It is one of reading comprehension. The answer is “1 + 4 = 5” because it is the only equation that has the correct result. It was so easy to jump to the wrong conclusion and charge ahead with the solution.

This had me thinking about all the ways in business and in life that we do this same thing, jump to conclusions and miss the real problem, often with disastrous results.

The road to disaster is paved with the wrong problem

There are some classic business stories on this topic. Kodak and Blockbuster are two of these. The problem Blockbuster was trying to solve was around its stores – how to get more stores and get more sales and profit from each store. They famously turned down an offer to buy Netflix for $50M. Any guess what that investment would have yielded? As I am writing this, Netflix market capitalization is nearly $235B.

It was a similar situation at Kodak, which invented digital photography and had one of the world’s first online photo sharing platforms. During the early 2000s, digital photography was overtaking traditional photography. In this same time frame the problem that Kodak focused on was how to drive the printing of more photos, completely missing that digital photography and online sharing was becoming the business. In 2011 Kodak filed for Chapter 11 protection and turned its focus to commercial digital imaging.

Getting blinded by your own stories

This tendency to ignore or discount information that does not fit our way of thinking was perhaps first talked about by Chris Argyris. He called it the “Ladder of Inference.” The basic idea is that people, teams and even organizations get rooted in a way of thinking and operating that blinds them to any data or information that would contradict their long-held beliefs and experiences.

I witnessed this tendency play out with a senior leader I worked with recently. This SVP level business unit leader has had 2 new bosses in a short time due to a reorganization. One result is that this leader now works for someone who used to be a peer. This leader is doing the same work, for the same pay, with the same title, and she, like many of us might, considers this to be a “demotion.”

This has become the dominant story that she has made up and from which she is operating. She has built this into an even bigger and negative story with the headline, “They are trying to get rid of me.” This has translated into some unproductive behaviors – not least of which has been the spreading of this narrative to others and undermining her team’s faith in her and the company. This has also led her to hold back on big ideas for her business unit and the enterprise, because “they have no chance of being adopted given that they don’t see my value.” In general, she is less effective. By the time I was brought in to coach her, it looked very much like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

By contrast, in talking to her colleagues, almost everything I heard about this leader was positive. “She is a master at her trade,” “She is passionate about her work and the company,” “She cares about her direct reports and their development,” “She is a team player.” The list of strengths went on and on. The only opportunities for improvement involved the leader’s response to the structural changes and a general sense that she was depressed and demoralized.

This came to a head during one meeting we had together where she reported that she would be getting more resources and more responsibility—a goal she had long sought. She shared this information with a somber tone, which surprised me, since this issue of not having enough resources had been one of her key bits of evidence for the “They want to get rid of me” narrative. I called her out on this contradiction, and we spent some time working through this inconsistency between her story of the problem she was facing, and the now readily apparent truth—that she was on the verge of undermining her own leadership, and potentially taking her team with her, for a nonexistent reason.

Five ways to avoid the “wrong problem” problem

Fortunately, we had caught the “wrong problem” problem before this leader had done herself irreparable harm, and once she was able to see the truth more clearly, she rapidly reverted to her old self and was able to refocus her team as well. We went on to take the opportunity to work together to lead her team to change the way they view problem solving as a team skill, to avoid the same trap and get to better results, faster.

Building on the practices we worked on together, here are 5 things to do as a leader, and with your team, to avoid chasing after the wrong proble

1. Slow down, especially if the stakes are high. Check your action bias and make it a practice to slow down and take steps to consider how well you understand the situation, and what might be going on, before jumping to the diagnosis of the problem.
2. Develop a list of alternative definitions of the problem you are trying to solve. A great way to start doing that is to consider the different definitions that might apply to your problem. Do this yourself and encourage your team to implement this as an exercise.
3. Invite different perspectives from diverse stakeholders. Another useful practice is to systematically seek out a range of opinions about the problem, to help generate a range of alternatives. Gathering the views of those who see the world differently will guarantee new thinking. During team meetings, make it a practice to go around the table to seek all views, and potentially invite stakeholders outside of your team to weigh in as well.
4. Identify a “devil’s advocate” to challenge assumptions and potential solutions. A great technique for making sure you are thinking broadly enough is to formally identify a “devil’s advocate,” someone to play the role of challenging your view of the problem. It can be a trusted colleague, or an external advisor. This is also a valuable team meeting tool – make sure to rotate the role to make it an effective part of the team culture.
5. ‍Consider looking at your problem with the “eyes of a child” or what Buddhists call “beginner’s mind.” This practice of having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a problem, just as a beginner would, can help you step back from the moment to consider the problem in a new way.

The next time you are telling yourself a story about a problem you are solving—or your team is hashing through with you—make sure to take a step back to see if you have it right.

By the way – if you want to have some more fun with this topic, I invite you to experience the Colour Changing Card Trick. Have fun!

‍

Without proper onboarding, newcomers run the risk of failing to:

• Learn how the organization operates
• Identify how best to perform their job and help the organization achieve its objectives
• Engage with their new team

So when does onboarding start?

It's not uncommon for organizations to think of onboarding as kicking off on the first day of employment. After all, that's when employees receive their computer, email account, access to company information, and perhaps even meet their team for the first time, among many other things.

In reality, onboarding new employees starts long before their first day on the job. It actually starts when they apply for the job, and sometimes even earlier depending on what is publicized about the organization and role.

Throughout the hiring process, candidates begin to form impressions of what life in the organization and job will be like. Does your hiring process and all its components teach candidates about the role and life in the organization?

If not, imagine the possibilities if you could jumpstart the onboarding process by harnessing this time that you have with future employees. Not only could time to proficiency decrease, but retention could also increase because candidates are better informed about life in the organization and role.

What does this actually look like? Here are four elements that should be factored into every hiring process at every organization:

1. An engaging experience that keeps candidates…well…engaged. The objective of the talent acquisition process is to identify, screen, assess, and select candidates, not to entertain them. But that doesn't mean that the process should be as exciting as a root canal, either.
   
   With appropriately designed assessments and interviews (conducted by properly trained interviewers, of course) the talent acquisition process can and should be engaging. Just like eLearning, people should feel good about the time that they spend going through the process—they should feel like it was time well-spent.
   
   And once you have candidates engaged, keep them engaged (often referred to as “warm”) through regular communication. There is little worse for a candidate than wondering where they are in the process, whether the organization has ruled them out, or when a decision will be made.
   
   You want candidates to be excited about the prospect of working for your organization, as this excitement turns into increased job offer acceptance rates as well as increased engagement and performance once on the job.
2. An appropriately rigorous process. This is a balance, and a bit like the British fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The process can't be so rigorous that it dies under its own weight, nor can it be so light that it lacks utility.
   
   What do these two scenarios tell the candidate? The former scenario tells the candidate that the organization over-engineers things and makes them more complicated than they need to be—that doesn't sound very fun (unless you also like to over-engineer things).
   
   The latter scenario tells the candidate that the organization spends time on things with very little impact—also not good. Instead, Goldilocks likes a process that is just right.
   
   This, of course, depends on the role itself. Candidates for an entry-level role will likely be put off by a lengthy process with numerous steps, whereas candidates for a senior-level role will likely feel unheard by an extremely brief process that consists of a single interview. Instead, align the level of rigor to the role, and make certain that the process conveys the right message to candidates.
3. Assessments modeled after the job and organization. This is perhaps the hardest element to incorporate, but it's also one of the most critical. If you want to know whether a candidate will be able to learn a procedure to produce widgets, the best way to assess this is to put them in a situation where they have to learn a procedure to produce widgets.
   
   Of course, asking them about times when they had to learn something new or administering an assessment of learning ability would both be informative, but nothing will be as informative as having them demonstrate their ability to perform the job.
   
   And guess what else this does—it teaches the candidate about the job. The candidate walks away from the hiring process knowing exactly what the job will entail and how closely the job aligns with what the candidate wants.
   
   Granted, most employees will not be hired to produce widgets and instead hired to make decisions, lead others, develop new products, advise customers, etc. These kinds of roles are a bit harder to emulate in the hiring process, but it can still be done.
   
   And the benefits to predicting future job success, reducing time to proficiency, and reducing turnover are well-worth the time and energy to get it right.
4. On-brand messaging. Finally, the hiring process and all of its steps should convey the message about the organization that the organization wants to convey.
   
   A tech company, for example, should not have a paper-based application process—what would that say to candidates? An organization that prides itself on having a warm and inviting culture should not have a cold and sterile process—recruiters and interviewers should be warm, assessments should be welcoming rather than intimidating.
   
   The point is that throughout the entire hiring process, candidates piece together what they think is true about the organization and job. When this picture is accurate, the organization and candidate both win. When the picture is inaccurate, no one wins.

It’s no secret that talent acquisition is a mission-critical piece of the employment lifecycle, but it can be used as more than just as a selection tool. By reviewing the process, engagement, messaging, and implementing the proper assessments, your organization can gain more than just a great hire—you’ll get one who is excited, eager and enthusiastic to advance both the culture and the business.

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.

During turmoil, the business community tends to focus on continuity — emphasizing efficiency in turn. Both are critical. If you were to take any lessons away from the financial crisis of 2008, however, it might be wiser to think about how resiliency is key to long-term success.

Even in the depths of that recession, resilient companies showed a 25-point higher EBITDA than “nonresilient” counterparts and enjoyed markedly better recovery. A large part of this was due to business preparedness, as “resilients” took measures to reduce nonperforming assets, strengthen balance sheets, cut costs and prioritize customer-focused investments.

However, building a successful company involves more than business-oriented resilience (think cutting costs or shifting processes). It also involves organizational resilience: the strength of your people and how they’ll manage and lead moving forward.

4 Tactics for building organizational resilience

Covid-19 reinvigorated the need for both business and organizational resilience. Those at the helm of a business need to not only find ways to lead through uncertainty and anticipate change, but also foster companywide resilience. If you’re looking to do so, focus on these areas:

1. Leadership

Crises often hit companies in many areas at once, whether that’s with teams, communication, or operations. Without the right mindset, leaders struggle to find true north to help everyone see past the present moment. Immersing leaders into similar experiences (through simulations and scenario-planning) can help provide insights into how to ameliorate crises, set clear objectives, and take action holistically — which research suggests has become increasingly important for leaders. Besides this, leadership groups can also encourage an open exchange of ideas and establish new networks.

2. Individuals

Even with Covid-19 out of the equation, there’s no shortage of stressors in employees’ lives. Three-quarters of people admit to experiencing job burnout, with 40% connecting it to Covid-19. Similarly, more than one-third of workers have clocked longer hours recently. To support overall organizational resiliency, companies must start from the ground level by ensuring their employees are fit to work.

With this in mind, offer opportunities to connect with professional coaches. Provide access to platforms or apps (such as TaskHuman) that allow for diverse personalized support. You could also introduce mindfulness training and equip managers with the skills to help them better engage in personal conversations.

3. Teams

Shifting from a hierarchical to a flat structure has been beneficial in many organizations. Zappos adopted a holacracy back in 2014, for instance, and its team members decided to manage themselves as internal “small businesses.” You don’t need to reorganize as radically as Zappos, but it helps to rethink the corporate structure to encourage teamwork. Additionally, invest in collaborative tools like Slack or Yammer, and encourage employees to reach out to colleagues they normally wouldn’t to bring more knowledge into the mix.

4. Talent

Covid-19 brought talent management and business continuity into sharper focus as employees “left the building” — many for good. One CEO at a leading Chinese insurance company utilized a Business Continuity Planning Software and took steps to address job dissatisfaction by investing in employee training and development, reasoning that continued learning will boost growth once the pandemic subsides. This is a solid starting point, but take things a step further and make cultural changes that generate, engage, and empower talent. Focus on solidifying talent in employees in their day-to-day lives — not just through periodic training.

Organizational resilience is a critical component to ensuring success through crisis, and it can only be accomplished by focusing on your most important asset: people. Invest in the right tools, provide the necessary support, and make talent development a priority. Your operations are only as resilient as your leadership.

Here’s something leaders can do right now that would have a significant, powerful, and positive impact on the company: Have fewer, better meetings. More than any other corporate initiative push for growth, or effort to reduce costs, nothing can have a more immediate impact on performance and productivity than fixing meetings.

If this seems too good to be true, consider what poor meetings are costing companies today. It’s bad, surprisingly so, and research confirms the enormous drainaudit on company dollars that comes with excessive, unproductive meetings. Just as significant is the impact that poor meetings have on employee engagement and morale. One client recently expressed an idea I’ve heard from many recently: “Our meetings are soul-crushing. With COVID, it’s meetings all day, every day. Meetings were never great before, but now, they are terrible.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. The good news is that improving meetings can happen at any time, and even small changes can have a tangible impact, often sooner than you think. Here’s a good place to begin.

Put your meetings through a car wash. If you want to improve meetings, clean them up. How? There are many actions that produce positive outcomes, but here’s the most important one: Be willing to try. It is easy to feel like we have very little control over our calendars, and there is no question that leaders have tremendous demands on their time, but don’t let that stop you before you start. You may not be able to clean up all meetings, but you can clean up some, and even great meetings have room for improvement.

Start with a few simple steps.

1. Audit and edit your existing meetings.
   ‍Here’s a good exercise to do on a periodic basis. Make a list of all meetings you lead or participate in on a consistent, predictable basis and remove those that are low value where possible. If you aren’t sure where to begin, take some time to review the meetings on your calendar and let responses to the questions below help guide your next step about what to eliminate: Is there anything you can eliminate without further discussion? Would there be any consequences if you stopped attending this meeting? How would those who attend your meetings evaluate their effectiveness? In one sentence, describe the purpose of this meeting? Do you (or others) prepare for this meeting? If this meeting went away, would anyone care?
2. Make small improvements.
   ‍Take a few simple actions to make your remaining meetings even better. Start by reducing the number of participants who must attend, so you’ve got the right people in the room and everyone who attends is expected to contribute. (Amazon is reported to use the “two pizza” rule to keep meetings effective: No meeting should be so large that two pizzas can't feed the whole group). Consider establishing ‘meeting-free’ days where possible. Cut meeting times in half or reduce the frequency of meetings altogether. At a minimum, better manage meeting time itself. Use timed agendas and timekeepers to prevent meetings from running late. While you’re at it, assign rotating roles, from notetaker to meeting facilitator to a ‘Devil’s Advocate’ – someone who is appointed to deliberately challenge or present an opposing view to an idea.
3. Focus on meeting excellence.
   ‍High performing teams create guidelines for how they will engage with each other during meetings, from defining a meeting purpose, to making decisions, to handling conflict, to preparing for meetings. The best teams we’ve worked with don’t leave good meetings up to chance or assume people will just automatically know what to do. They take the time to get very concrete and specific about defining the relevant behaviors, processes, or actions that will create meeting success. For instance, consider the executive team that wanted to ensure the voice of the customer was better integrated into their strategy, products, and services. So, they developed a list of concrete meeting behaviors and actions to ensure a customer orientation was reflected throughout the process. Today, if you attend a meeting at this company – no matter what the meeting topic – you’ll hear stories about customers, see a ‘customer segment’ built into every agenda, and hear meeting participants ask questions about how the customer perspective was considered when a new initiative or project was being proposed.

The best part about having fewer, better meetings is that the benefits to companies extend far beyond meetings themselves. One meeting at a time, leaders can take deliberate, positive action to advance the company’s strategy, improve their culture, increase ownership and accountability, and make positive inroads that elevate leader and team performance across the board. Imagine: Meetings could become something we want to attend, that we look forward to, that we see as a valuable place for us to learn, contribute, grow, and become even better.

In recent years, interest in concepts such as Big Data, Machine Learning, and Data Science have increased significantly, both economically and in the media. But what do they really mean? There are six aspects of the data world that every leader should understand: Business Intelligence, Data Analytics, Data Science, Data Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, and Big Data.

Business Intelligence: Understanding the Past

Business Intelligence is the most classic data-based discipline. It is most similar to working with Excel – in fact, it is totally normal to find BI positions in Excel. Business Intelligence is based on the creation of command boxes – also known as dashboards – which represent the current or past state of the business; examples include sales percentages, seasonal evolutions, and tables of best-selling products. Business analysts are great at creating these types of summaries and taking advantage of them to guide future decision-making.

Some of the most popular programs in this field are PowerBI, Excel, and Tableau.

Data Analytics: Making Sense of Data

Data analytics is perhaps the most difficult aspect to define. It is of intermediate accessibility, serving a wide variety of professionals, from the most code-oriented to those in specialized programs. Data analysts’ roles range from data collection to modeling, through transformation and summarization. It is common to find data analysis linked to the concept of insights, which can be translated as keys. Data analytics seek clues or better understanding of data to draw conclusions that were not obvious before.

Apart from the programs used for Business Intelligence, it is common to find analyst positions that employ Python languages, R, and SQL.

Data Science: Anticipating the Future

Data science goes a step further than classic data analytics, and begins to use machine learning models to make predictions. The biggest difference between data analytics and data science that is that the latter deals with events that have not yet occurred and the ways that data can be used to anticipate them. For example, data can help predict the type of product that a customer will buy when accessing your website; it can predict the probability of cancer, given a patient’s genetics. It is usually described as the intersection of Computing, Statistics, and Business.

Data science is mostly linked to programming languages, especially Python, and to a lesser extent R and SQL.

Data Engineering: Organizing the Data

Data engineering is the most technical of all. Associated more with “the how” rather than “the what,” data engineering is based on the principles of extract, transform and load (ETL), which is a summary of the process of moving data for later exploitation. Data engineering professionals oversee the structuring of databases or warehouses, ensuring that the data is stored and used efficiently and safely. It is perhaps the “least friendly” dimension of data for end users, as it is closer to more classical computing than analytics.

To the aforementioned Python and SQL, it’s necessary to add some classic languages such as Java or the lesser-known Scala.

Now, the delicate concepts – AI and big data. These aren’t delicate because of their low validity –  they are actually highly valid – but because of their indiscriminate use in public conversation.

Artificial Intelligence

The concept of Artificial Intelligence is also more nuanced, and in many cases, misused. In most media, it is used to describe processes or algorithms that are actually Machine Learning. The border is a bit blurry: in fact, in many cases, ML is considered a sub-field of AI.  In short, the primary difference between the two is that Intelligence comprises autonomous creativity or decision making, while the vast majority of Machine Learning algorithms  respond to very specific tasks.

For the general public, it is reasonable to confuse Machine Learning with Artificial Intelligence, since in both cases machines produce results autonomously. However, at a technical level, Machine Learning is a field with a great future – and presence – in the vast majority of businesses, while Artificial Intelligence is still far from being widely applied. The best-known examples of ML currently are autonomous driving or voice assistants.

Big Data

Big Data could use a brief clarification. The term refers to all processes that require unconventional methods or technologies to be executed, since private computers, for example, do not have enough power. Big Data commonly refers to increased volume, variety, and speed of data generation.

So, the term Big Data is used when the amount or type of data requires special treatment, usually in distributed architectures in the cloud, such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services. To be more specific, it is preferable to start using expressions such as “data science solutions in a Big Data environment,” or “Big Data for business analysis.”

In conclusion

Understanding the six major data technologies is a critical starting place for every leader. Whether you’re implementing a data culture, undergoing digital transformation, or just want to keep up-to-date with digital trends, it’s essential to know what these six technologies mean and how they are being utilized in the marketplace.

We agree – 2020 was all about silver linings. Finding them, hanging on to them. Because this ride isn’t over yet.

So you know you from the first post in our blog series that before you look try to support others, you need to put on your own oxygen mask first. That’s key.

So, what’s next? Making sure you surround yourself with a village to sustain that well-being will allow for maximum productivity and effectiveness. In other words – forge connections.

‍Vital Friends author Tom Rath digs into Gallup research that shows the absence of a best friend at work results in only 1 in 12 employees being engaged in their jobs. One. In. Twelve. While some might find humor in the idea of a “best friend at work,” it has real business impact. Gallup’s research links employee engagement to profit, sales, safety, and productivity. It turns out that this skeptically viewed “best friend” question has one of the strongest links to those hard and important measures that the board and investors care so much about.

Everyone needs connection – hardly a groundbreaking concept. Some need it more, some need it less, but research clearly tells us that everyone needs it in some form to be successful and to be happy. It is even more challenging to do this in a still-virtual environment, where it takes more deliberate action. Here are four ways we look at how leaders should be thinking about how their connections can help them excel:

1. Maintain your sanity
2. Get stuff done
3. Expand your influence
4. Find fulfillment

Connect to maintain your sanity—and others’ too

‍“Even though people spend more of their waking hours at work than anywhere else, people underestimate how work influences their overall wellbeing and daily experience.” - Tom Rath

The typical American works about 1,800 hours per year, and that number has likely increased during pandemic times, with blurred work-life boundaries. Worse yet, we’re more anxious and overwhelmed. A pulse check by the American Psychological Association found that nearly 8 in 10 adults say the coronavirus pandemic is a significant source of stress in their lives, and nearly 1 in 5 adults say their mental health is worse than it was at this time last year. Perhaps not shocking – but are we as leaders helping to create and encourage the outlets to manage that stress?

‍Create a dedicated connection forum or platform

‍Of course, there is much you can do on your own to restore and maintain your sanity. We covered some of that in our first post. The task here is to involve others in maintaining or even growing your – and their – sanity and provide a platform to help your team do the same. In the midst of the pandemic, our founder and CEO Suzanne Bates instituted a “buddy system” at the company. The idea being that on any given day, someone might need a captive ear, a shoulder, or just a colleague to process with. It wasn’t about catching up on work things – it was more about checking in on each other’s well-being. While team members approached it in different ways – some met weekly, others just when they needed support – having a safe space and a means of asking “how are you, really?” has in many cases transcended just emotional connections, and has led to innovative ideas, brainstorming, and in some cases – new ways of working together. In fact, this blog series is a byproduct of a great buddy partnership.

‍Connect to get stuff done

‍As a leader, you need other people to accomplish your goals. You need to rally the troops, ensure alignment, and motivate them to execute. At Bates, we call this intentionality: being able to clarify direction for the team and keep actions aligned and on track. In other words, driving execution through others.

All of that is challenged in this virtual environment. In person, you may more easily get a sense of how projects are going, if there are roadblocks, or if the team is feeling overwhelmed. But when you’re not in the room or having those regular conversations, you may not pick up on the things that slow progress. To adjust, you must develop a more systematic approach to connecting about initiatives and goals.

For example, we are working with the top supply chain leader for a global industrial organization. This leader has been charged with spearheading a re-engineering initiative. This would be a difficult task even pre-COVID. Gone are the impromptu hallway conversations or water cooler chat she might have to ease into these sensitive discussions with her team. She has found that to drive this initiative forward, she must spend more time with people and consciously create interactions that otherwise would have occurred naturally. And it can’t be all about business, given that she is in a position of needing to ask people to give up budget, people, or both – often tough, personal, and emotional decisions.

‍Create a roadmap to make the right connections

‍We recommend you create what we call an Initiative and Influencers Matrix. Jot down a list of the top three things you need to get done – whether big initiatives or small projects – down the left-hand side of the grid. Along the top, capture the key stakeholders you need to get that work done. In each box, break down the stakeholder names into two buckets: stakeholders you’re regularly in touch with, and stakeholders who might have fallen off your radar. Identify and map the connections you might need to create or reignite to be your most effective and productive self and create the buy in you need to move further, faster.

‍Connect to expand your influence

‍The third aspect of connection deals with your work future – who do you need to stay connected and visible to so that you don’t derail your own business success? We all know the adage, it’s not what you know but who you know. Well, we think it is a both/and equation.

Consider this client we worked with. Dan ran a multibillion-dollar business at a Fortune 50 company. For better or worse, he was often quite literally the smartest person in the room – at least according to his senior leadership team colleagues. He tended to write off people who didn’t share the same level of perceived intellect and drive for success. More than once, this discounting of key stakeholders nearly cost him his career. In fact, in at least one case, his inability to take a peer-to-peer approach held him back from taking on a bigger role. Dan learned the hard way that professional growth is a team sport. We know from our research that humility (having an openness to others), inclusiveness (bringing others into the conversation), and interactivity (consistent and frequent interpersonal exchanges) are fundamental to leadership effectiveness and can be the difference between flatlining and expanding your sphere of influence – even if you’re one of the most senior people in the room.

‍Create a personal board of directors

‍Establish a formal or informal network of colleagues, friends, mentors, advisors to connect with regularly as a sounding board, and advisory group. Think about who could help you broaden your perspectives, get exposure to other parts of the business, provide advice and guidance. Think beyond the usual suspects. Who are the individuals who you are not close to who might influence your opportunity for impact – for better or worse? Who might your dissident stakeholders be? And bring them close. Who are some leaders or colleagues outside the company who could bring an unbiased perspective and fresh ideas? For very senior leaders with few peers within the organization, this approach can be game changing.

‍Connect to find fulfillment

‍Sometimes connection isn’t about the day-to-day work at all. Of course, you need connections to get work done. But connections in the workplace don’t have to solely focus on what helps you contribute to the bottom line, hit deadlines, move business forward. They may be about finding personal fulfillment and meaning at work – which often drive creativity and innovation. Gallup would tell us that engaged and motivated employees are more productive. And we don’t disagree with that.

We have a female executive in the technology space who loves her job. She really finds the work interesting, and intellectually challenging. And while she has decent relationships with her senior leadership team colleagues, she doesn’t have a lot in common with them. As working mother with young children – in a predominantly male field – she was missing relatable, empathetic connections that would help her maintain energy and balance when life and work was feeling out of whack.

‍Tap your leadership skills and role to inspire others and yourself

‍We talked about where she could take on a leadership role in one of the organization’s support communities. Most companies have some form of Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) or Team Member Networks. ERGs are not just for mid-level or high potential employees – they are critical for senior leaders who can actively participate as executive advisors or sponsors. Visible representation for high-level executives gives credence to the importance of connection and balance. It helps set the tone for more junior team members in the organization while also allowing those senior leaders to benefit from new interactions and community of an expanded group of employees.

This client found a renewed sense of purpose by taking on a sponsor role with the Women’s ERG. She was able to encourage and support networking, leadership programs, and volunteer opportunities for women across all business units and levels of the company – and found herself lifted and inspired by the camaraderie.

Often as leaders we focus on the “what” that needs to get done – driving the business forward, hitting our strategic priorities, delivering for clients and shareholders. But we focus less on the “how” that will get us there. The critical relationships and connections that not only pave the way for efficient work but help lessen the singular responsibility for any one leader by sharing some of that mental and emotional burden with key partners. The hardest part is being intentional and carving out the time to focus on building those connections so you, in turn, can be an even more effective leader for your people.

So consider our advice – find ways to establish relationships at work that will help you stay sane during the tumultuous times, while also helping you push that rock up the hill with a bit more ease. Try out one or more of these ideas we shared and encourage your teams to do the same.

‍Balance is about finding your zen so you can focus on what needs to be done. Connection is about maintaining that zen so you can get work done. And our next blog post about effectiveness? It’s about channeling that zen – cutting out the noise and clutter – so you can deliver with excellence and productivity.

A client recently said, “I have virtual meetings from 8am-6pm, eat dinner, and work until late in the evening. Then I work on the weekend—I am totally fried.” Sound familiar? You’re not alone. We’re hearing this same concern from many of the leaders we advise whose organizations have gone virtual.Without being able to connect with colleagues in the office, calendars are crammed. Formal meetings replace dropping in for a chat. Leaders squeeze in planning time late at night or the 30 seconds between video meetings. Ironically, even with so many meetings, leaders feel they are less in touch with their teams and lack the insight to know what is truly going on. And to top it off, being their best as a partner, parent, and friend, well… that’s reached an all-time low, too.Unfortunately, this is one of the great challenges in our virtual world. A whole set of boundaries leaders previously relied on have been erased. The commute, decompression time between office and home, and the distance between the two are no longer a sanctuary. Home is the office and vice versa. One client recently told us that she misses her commute—something she said she could never have imagined saying a year ago.And, with even more pressure on executives to increase revenue, execute strategy quickly, and reduce expenses, it is likely this division between work and home will become even blurrier.

Boundaries create needed structure for you and others

We know deep down that working this way isn’t sustainable for the long-term and yet it’s unclear now how much longer virtual will be the norm. Many companies are making decisions to eliminate traditional office space. After this pandemic is over, perhaps many will still be remote. This is why boundaries are more critical now than ever for executives. Using strategies to ensure you have ample planning and thinking time and to attend to important work relationships is critical for you to free up bandwidth to lead your team and focus on what’s most important to move your business in the right direction.By treating your time as a highly valuable commodity, you’ll make the right choices to invest your time where it will yield the greatest return.As Robert Frost wrote, “Good fences make good neighbors.”Not only does setting productive boundaries create time for you; it enables you to be a better colleague by offering the opportunity for appropriate redirection to get things done even more quickly and efficiently without your involvement. With an already over-booked schedule, taking on multiple new requests daily simply slows down processes, creates a bottle neck for others, and layers on additional stress for you.On the other hand, establishing productive boundaries creates value added focus, strong partnerships, and bridges silos while advancing the business and your team.You’ll be able to respond to requests by providing even better ways to accomplish the objective. Others will begin to see you as a strong sounding board and as a thought partner. They will know they can count on you to share your perspective to get things done most effectively and efficiently. If this is your intention, any reluctance to be a good steward of your own time is to your detriment.This may sound counterintuitive. After all, setting boundaries often implies a lack of cooperation or collegiality. However, many leaders who employ the right boundaries tell us these fences benefiteveryone by fostering the right progress on important strategies.Most people have a hard time saying no. We want to be seen as a team player and being asked to help often equates to being valued. However, too often our performance is diminished by fragmenting our efforts across too many domains. By taking on more, we end up doing less.

So how do you set effective boundaries?

As requests come in, quickly analyze whether taking on the task is a smart use of your limited energy and time. Ask yourself these three tough questions:1. Is my participation necessary? If not, whose is?2. Is it necessary now? If not, what is the right timing?3. Is this the optimal way to do this project? If not, what is the best way?If you answer ‘no’ to any of these three, re-direct the effort in a way that makes better business sense. By saying ‘no’ while offering a solution, you will be considered a collaborative thought partner. Use one of these three phrases:No, not…

• …me: You acknowledge the work needs to be done and, while saying you’re not the person to do the work, you are recommending the right resource.
• …now: You recognize that time is often the scarcest resource and that, if your direct involvement is critical, you are opening the door to a mutually agreeable timeline.
• …this way: While you value the outcome the other party is seeking, you are collaborating on an approach that may be more efficient or effective.

If saying ‘no’ feels uncomfortable, a ‘yes, if…’ phrase is a positive alternative to create the same boundaries:Yes, if…

• …someone else does it: Recommend someone who is a viable replacement for you, perhaps someone who could use some exposure or for whom it can be a beneficial learning opportunity.
• …we adjust the timing: Offer timing that will work for you and the business.
• …we structure it differently: Suggest a way to reach the end goal that is equally or more effective and works for you.

The outcome: good fences and better outcomes

Building strong fences enables you to become an important solution rather than a bottleneck. You become the proverbial good neighbor to your colleagues and the enterprise. And most importantly, you begin to clear valuable pockets on your calendar for your most important focus.The best leaders set aside thinking and preparation time, honor it, and use it wisely. Don’t you owe it to yourself, and everyone else, to create boundaries that enable you and your organization to thrive?

P R E S S  R E L E A S E

Stockholm, January 4^th, 2021

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN - BTS GROUP AB (publ.), a leading global strategy implementation firm, has agreed to acquire Bates Communications Inc. based in Boston, USA. Bates was founded in the year 2000 with a mission to drive corporate performance by guiding executives to engage and inspire their organizations.

With revenues exceeding 7 MUSD in 2020 and a strong team of 23 experienced employees, Bates Communications has demonstrated strong resilience against the impacts of the pandemic in 2020.

Bates Communications is helping some of the top companies in the world execute their strategies through C-Suite Advisory, Executive Coaching, Team Performance, Leader Communications, Executive Presence Leadership Development and Executive Succession and Onboarding, primarily in the USA. All of these services, including related solutions and proprietary IP, will strengthen and expand current BTS offerings.

Bates has an impressive client portfolio within a broad spectrum of industries that includes financial services and insurance, technology, healthcare and pharmaceuticals as well as the retail and consumer industries. The client portfolio has only limited overlap with BTS.

Bates’ senior talent and consultants will bring complementary and sought-after capabilities to BTS. Their team members have backgrounds and long experience in business, strategy, corporate communication, and management psychology.

In joining the BTS family, Bates Communications may offer the full range of BTS services to their clients including Leadership, Change & Transformation and Sales Enablement. BTS in turn can bring additional services with good potentials to its clients, both in the USA and internationally.

“2020 was an acute reminder of the criticality of executive leadership. Bates brings expertise to leaders to help them achieve communication that is clear, powerful and authentic. This enables organizations to drive their strategies forward, accelerate their adoption, and foster a caring culture. Bates’ world-class communication and executive presence capabilities bolster the executive leadership offering of BTS,”

says Henrik Ekelund, Founder and CEO of BTS.

Bates Communications will be integrated with BTS USA Inc. and become BTS Boston, which gives BTS USA an important presence in the significant market in the US Northeast. Bates will add important capabilities for all work in the areas of Executive & Team development.

“We are seeing significant demand for guidance for executives and their teams on their ever-evolving strategy implementations. Bates brings seasoned expertise and deepens our capabilities in helping the C-Suite with their challenges in these respects,”

says Jessica Parisi, President of BTS USA.

Founder Suzanne Bates and all members of her leadership team have agreed to stay on with BTS for a minimum of 3 years to accelerate the integration and growth strategy.

“Our team is delighted to join BTS as we share similar values and entrepreneurial cultures. The global presence of BTS, its services and experience will be highly valued by our people and our customers,” says Suzanne Bates. “Bates executive, communication & team services are a perfect complement to BTS, and we are excited to continue to innovate as we begin to work on client challenges together.”

The acquisition includes an initial cash consideration as well as a new issue of BTS shares up to 1 MUSD. Additional amounts will be paid out in 2021-2024 provided Bates meets specific targets 2020-2023. The transaction is effective as soon as the completion procedures have been finalized, which is expected in the coming week.

BTS strategy for acquisitions aims to create a broader base for future organic growth while actively consolidating in a highly fragmented market. Through its acquisitions, BTS also seeks to serve new and existing customers with innovative services based on the next generation of digital technologies.

For more information, please contact:

‍

Henrik Ekelund

CEO and founder
BTS Group AB (publ.)
+46-8-587 070 00

Michael Wallin

Head of investor relations
BTS Group AB (publ.)
‍michael.wallin@bts.com
‍+46-8-587 070 02
+46-708-78 80 19

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

At the ten-year mark of his tenure as CEO, David thought he should no longer postpone naming potential successors, though the board said it would be happy if he stayed on for several more years.

He chose two candidates: the CFO and the head of the largest commercial business. However, that is where the succession planning ended. There was no formal process by which to evaluate, select and develop the candidates. The ensuing year brought chaos.

The two selected executives formed camps of loyal followers and began undermining one another at every turn. They appeared to the CEO to be engaged in collegial, healthy competition. The reality nearly tore the company apart. The dueling turned bitter, prompted poor decisions, and inspired bad behavior down through the organization, culminating in a potentially fraudulent practice by one candidate. Both were dismissed. The CEO stayed three more years as the board hired a search firm, vetted candidates, chose a president, and prepared to transition the next chief executive.

The danger of failing to plan

While this is an extreme example of failing to plan, many organizations can attest to the bitter internal struggles, organizational disruption, prolonged uncertainty, and negative impact of not having an orderly succession plan.

It does not require complex analysis to understand why many don’t do this. A board typically has confidence in its CEO and gets comfortable with who they have at the helm. They are focused on other fiduciary duties and are often satisfied seeing other senior leaders in the boardroom on a limited basis. Months turn into years. Complacency ensues.

And there is the CEO. Who among us wants to contemplate our own “mortality” in a job? For CEOs, this may be the last job before retirement. As they focus on the here and now, postponing the process may not feel as risky as it is.

Why is it important to start planning now? The average tenure of CEOs has plummeted, from 8.5 years in 2003, down to 3.7 years now. This alone is reason for every board and CEO to begin within three to five years of the anticipated transition. Although it might sound absurd, one implication of this is that new CEOs should start thinking about their own successor during their own first 90 days.

Embracing the both/and mindset

The answer to overcoming complacency is to adopt a “both-and” mindset. The board and the organization can support the CEO AND plan ahead. An orderly process not only secures your company’s long-term success and stability; it is one of the last acts of a CEO to create a well-paved path to future success, and a powerful, positive legacy.

Most experts believe it is best to start at least 3 to 5 years in advance. If you take a “both-and” approach, you are instituting a rigorous program that includes identifying, assessing, and preparing top internal candidates for the role. You get behind the CEO today while developing the best internal candidates for the future. You can always go to an external search closer to the decision time, if warranted.

The urge to anoint a successor

It is tempting for CEOs to select one or two “obvious” CEO candidates. However, we all have conscious and unconscious biases. Starting with a broad search and resisting the urge to anoint a successor, is a far better guarantee of success. The larger pool and rigorous selection and development process not only avoids the negative dynamics of being seen as playing favorites; you are less likely to miss other top-notch candidates, particularly those with a different perspective, or cast in a different mold from the current leader.

Boards can fuel the tendency to let a CEO anoint a successor. They may rely on the CEO to determine who should make presentations to the board. They may be guided almost exclusively in their conversations by the CEO’s view of the candidates.  Boards should encourage the CEO and CHRO to embrace a transparent robust process of creating a profile of the next chief executive well in advance, assess the candidates, coach them, and prepare them with high value experiences.

Start with a CEO profile

The beginning of a rigorous succession process is to build a CEO Profile. What does the organization need in its next CEO, or, for that matter, any C-Suite leader? The CEO Profile can be developed collaboratively with the help of experts in an objective process. External expertise will help you to consider all the factors of success including the strategic vision and market dynamics that a new chief executive will face.

Even if the company is doing well, “more of the same” may not deliver on quantum growth or a competitive shift that can be a game-changer. The Profile provides flexibility to move in a new direction. One board we advised took the opportunity to radically rethink CEO selection as the company reached a pivot point, selecting a leader particularly well qualified to help the company change course.

Data and insights: an objective view

Once you have a well-developed CEO Profile the next step is to gather data, assess, and share these with potential candidates as part of their development plan. The organization and the leaders learn about their strengths and gaps and have the motivation and time to develop the capabilities they need most to do the job. Even your best candidates will not have it all. By providing data and insights and combining that with coaching, feedback, and new experiences, you can establish a unique program to prepare each candidate for the top job.

‍1. Assessment data

‍Assessment is an objective way to appreciate what leadership qualities, skills and experiences each candidate has now, and use the data to inform their development. What gets a leader here may not help them to ascend to the chief executive role.

A 360 assessment provides an objective evaluation about how the leader is showing up to others. One CEO candidate we assessed with the Bates ExPI^TM was exceptionally skilled at the technical side of the business, but needed to learn to inspire, energize, and align others to drive results. He embraced this data because he was able to tackle the right things to become a more well-rounded candidate. There are many types of assessments appropriate to the development phase of CEO succession. The key is to assess against your profile and get a detailed perspective.

‍2. Performance data

‍The second set of data to review and use in development is the candidate’s performance in recent roles. What results have they achieved? Savvy organizations create a sophisticated overview of performance by evaluating both the results achieved, and how the leader achieved them. Leaders that break the rules just to get bottom line performance don’t belong in a CEO succession plan.

In addition to business performance data, you can look at other data that already exists. Employee engagement surveys specific to that leader’s organization can be tracked over time for a historic view. Customer surveys, vendor surveys and interviews with direct reports can round out the picture of how the leader achieves results. As a coach works with the candidate, this data should factor into the development plan.

‍3. Career experiences

‍This third stream of data and development looks at a candidate’s ability to operate outside their comfort zone leading cross-functional, high impact initiatives. One company asked a sales leader with a take-no-prisoners approach to generating revenue to lead a new acquisition. She had to flex her approach and lead the team to collaborate, build agreements, and align. She was successful. Her CEO endorsed her candidacy, as the company planned to grow by acquisition in the future.

Bringing CEO candidates into adjacent or very different roles with new requirements gives them another view of the business, and tests untapped capabilities. Appointing leaders to be the executive sponsor or leader of a major transformation or change initiative is a powerful test. You want to see candidates deliver on a variety of fronts, such as enterprise technology implementation, or driving change in a go-to-market strategy or operating across multiple functions. Putting leaders in these critical roles develops their capabilities and gives you confidence they are ready.

In summary: the succession checklist

A robust succession management system is something you can always be doing, to support an ongoing pipeline to the C-suite. If this is not in place in your company, now is the time to get it right for later.

• Start early and initiate a rigorous process
• Resist the urge to anoint a candidate like you
• Provide the candidates with data and insights for strategic development
• Prioritize their development with coaching and stretch experiences
• Think of succession as a virtuous cycle that makes your organization healthy and strong

“I’ve realized I’m getting in the way of my organization’s speed and agility. I’ve become a decision-making bottleneck. Making quick decisions is so critical right now yet I also want to be inclusive. How can I speed up while getting the right level of buy-in and participation?”

‍An executive recently posed this question in an advisory session and he’s not alone. Many clients are asking similar questions. They’ve realized that with increased pressure the stakes are extremely high— most decisions need to be streamlined and they carry extra weight. The risk of a bad decision may mean the difference between expertly leading your organization through this challenging time or causing undo damage to the business.

"Speeding up while bringing others along is a common leadership concern these days."

Executives are moving faster than ever, and with so many people virtual, communication and decision-making challenges are real barriers to forward progress. During a time when decision making must be fast, leaders find themselves without the safety net of traditional ways they used gather data and garner buy-in, such as through casual interactions or dropping by a colleague’s or team member’s office.

A group of senior leaders we work with at a technology company had a recent ‘ah-ha’ about this very topic. They had been struggling to accelerate the strategies they were trying to put in place to keep the business growing and asked us to work with their team to help them increase their productive collaboration. When we taught them how to create structure and set expectations for intentional decision making, they quickly started seeing results. Their teams began buying into decisions more completely and they knew how to engage with their leader about the decision, resulting in creating quicker and smarter decisions.

What was the trick?

Here are 4 strategies you can use to create speed, buy-in, and a discipline of decision-making excellence:

1. Determine how much involvement and engagement is needed for the decision

2. Set expectations regarding who will make the decision

3. Set guardrails

4. Clarify how the decision is made

 1.   Determine how much involvement and engagement is needed for the decision

The decision-making graphic below shows four ways to make a decision, the resulting engagement each creates, and the involvement each requires. Interestingly, there is a time and place for each of these options, depending on how much time you have and how inclusive you need to be.

The Command approach has the least engagement and involvement. With this technique, the leader makes the decision without any input. This style is quite effective when speed is critical or when in an extreme crisis. For example, when the house is on fire, you don’t have time to consult and collaborate. Someone must take command and get everyone out of the building.

The Consult strategy has the next most engagement and involvement. The leader asks for input but makes it clear up front that they will make the final decision.

The Collaborate approach enables the leader and team to come to a collective decision, with some helpful guardrails to bound the discussion.

The Constrain technique is a ninja leadership skill. The leader delegates the decision and agrees to accept it, as long as it meets certain criteria. This requires trust and clarity on the part of the leader, which ups the ante, but also creates the most involvement and engagement from your team.

2. Set expectations regarding who will make the decision

Once you’ve decided which decision-making strategy you will use, make sure you communicate what strategy you are using and who is making the decision. For example, with Consult be clear up front that you are asking for input and want to hear from the team, but that you will make the final decision. And once the decision is made, you’ll communicate the decision and rationale behind it.

With Collaborate, communicate up front that you’ll discuss as a team and if the team can’t decide or get to a consensus, you will make the decision.

With Constrain, clarify that you are delegating the decision making to another person or a team and make sure they understand they are making the decision and will need to deliver that back along with the reasoning behind it.

3. Set guardrails

he Consult and Collaborate approaches engage others to provide input, but they run the risk of getting bogged down in group think and debate. To ensure timely decisions, the right guardrails need to be in place to maintain momentum.

With Consult you must be clear about what is up for discussion and how long the topic will remain open. For example, you might ask for input from your team about a specific topic for 15 minutes during a meeting, or for 3 days after the meeting. Once the time is up, then you can move in whatever direction you see fit, but the team understands how they can contribute, and there is less opportunity for second guessing once your decision is made.

With Collaborate, to ensure the decision doesn’t die in committee, specify how many need to be in agreement for the decision to stand and time bound the input. Be clear upfront, that you will discuss as a team and if 80% don’t agree by the end of the meeting, you will make the decision and communicate it back to everyone.

Constrain requires you to trust your team, and to provide clarity about your expectations, with any caveats. Since you delegate the decision, the criteria must be very well delineated—for example, it must come in on budget, or take less than a month to execute, or needs to occur by the end of the year.

4. Clarify how the decision was made

After making a decision, it’s easy to make the mistake of moving on without explaining how you reached your conclusion. Yet this common error erodes buy-in and engagement as the lack of transparency raises suspicions and doubt. Communicating how you reached a decision is a powerful teaching opportunity and a great way to get your team to stand behind the decision and execute on the plan. If a team knows the rationale behind a sound decision, they’re also more likely to back you up when communicating the strategy to their teams and to stakeholders.

These strategies create the conditions for sound decision making, not only by you, but also your team.

And this is important: a study referenced in The Harvard Business Review article, The Decision-Driven Organization, indicates that 95% of an organization’s performance comes down to the decision-making abilities of its leaders.

Don’t you owe it to your organization to get better at making the many critical decisions you make each week?

‍